How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organization’s resilience?   

I believe Colombia is facing a lot of uncertainty from the political and economic perspective, this is impacting several industries, in my case to be more specific I work with the pharmaceutical industry which is currently being exposed to different challenges. 

In this sense we need to adapt to the current circumstances tackling different fronts, this demands from legal to be a trusted business partner that not only understands the business needs and  the risks they are exposed to, but also as legal team to be able to propose  legal frameworks that allow the business to achieve their goals in difficult scenarios, this proactiveness to searching new ways to enable the business to do their job and continue its innovation traduces in trust from the business towards the legal management and reflects in resilience from the organisation. 

What are the main cases or transactions you have been involved in recently? 

The company that I work for currently faced the first resolution of compulsory license ever applied to a pharmaceutical product in Colombia. As the legal head for Colombia, I was the responsible to support and advised the patent holder and other stakeholders in the organisation with the legal strategy to defend the IP rights of the owner´s company in Colombia, in all different stages and before all the local authorities involved. I also was the channel of communication between headquarters and the external lawyers supporting this important case.  

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments?   

When I was doing my LLM at the “Instituto de Empresa” (IE) in Madrid,  I experienced  at first hand the need of our legal profession to respond to the constant change and also the complexity of our world, for this reason  they implemented a methodology they call “Liquid Learning” which means to change the traditional learning experience  in the case of legal students by migrating to transformational interactive and customer centric education.  

Later, at my current job I also faced something similar called “Costumer Centricity” which means the importance to understand the costumer, this means to identified what are they really interested on (Topics, preference of channels communication, content, data insight etc). For this reason, I believe that to be able to respond to these new challenges the legal profession needs to embrace different sources of Artificial Intelligence to be more agile covering different fronts more effectively and with powerful data insights to fulfill the expectations of the customer. 

In your opinion, what are the main trends that are salient in your country currently? 

From a business-based perspective, aligned with my previous answer, as costumer can be lost in a sea of information, I believed that main trends will focus on gaining the interest from the customer improving its experience allowing him to access the right information whenever they need,  through the channels that better suits them, helps them  not just to improve its knowledge but also to take informed decisions.