Team size:   Three 

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 organisation’s resilience? 

Instability and crisis mean exposure, from a legal perspective. Exposure to market’s risks, to contractor’s and service provider’s speculation, to legal uncertainty and to Government’s officials arbitrarily behavior. The natural legal approach to try to get a balance facing such events is to reinforce legal aspects in all contracts and documents, making terms clearer and more direct, reducing or avoiding clauses or situations which tend to interpretation, and adopting a more cautious or conservative stance in negotiations. The setback of this method is that you are prone to be stringent in your points of view, lose flexibility in terms of getting a deal, and will sooner or later collide with the more venturous, commercial-oriented business approach of strategic management.   

A good way to avoid that is through direct, constant and effective communication between the legal section and the strategic management; by “effective” I mean ensuring the strategic management fully understands the legal risks that may be involved in each major transaction and our role (the legal role) in minimising the legal impact to the corporation, and that a balance between getting a good deal while lowering to the utmost possible the legal risks involved can be achieved only by clearly setting the organisation’s goals and how much amount of legal risks are we willing (or able) to undertake in exchange for that. Such is the way we manage to align our legal strategy with the broader business strategy; (i) intensive communication and (ii) full and proper knowledge of the legal situation and lethal legal factors rapidly evolving in a crisis-stricken country, allowing us to  raise the levels of legal awareness within the corporation, and present ourselves not as the deal-breaker spats-specialists, but as the backbone risk-reducing team tailoring every transaction to guarantee manageable levels of legal risk assumptions. 

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?  

AI will greatly impact how legal support and services are provided, mainly in the quickness and quality of legal advisory. Not only AI is becoming a key tool for conducting legal research, but also for modelling legal strategies, drafting contracts and structuring legal transactions. As AI develops into a more complex and multifaceted technology, undoubtedly the first ones understanding the benefits and implementing such technology to obtain credible results from a legal perspective will hold a key advantage over the remaining legal staffs and firms and will be able to provide better advisory and support to its clients and Boards. Holding the edge in AI Today is not about reaching into the future; it is understanding the present to live the future Today, as the future has already reached us.   

Fortunately, AES has understood that and is implementing a series of innovative, ground-breaking AI-driven internal projects in cooperation with major players such as Microsoft and Google; and the AES legal team is the most involved team from all areas of the corporation, both locally and regionally. Personally, I’ve been assigned with the task of helping (with IT staff) to develop an internal AI-driven legal software called project Aurora, which will create the most complete legal clause and jurisprudence repository in the corporation, and will practically reshape the way contracts and legal documents  are drafted up, reducing the time spent creating legal documents and thus increasing efficiency. Such assignment has the advantage of forcing me to constantly stay updated on AI progress, which I regard as a welcomed addition to my professional development.  

How do you prioritise diversity and inclusion within your legal department, and what initiatives have you implemented to foster a more inclusive and equitable work environment?    

Fomenting integration and inclusion in a staff that is quite diverse is critical for success. In AES, both because our corporative culture favors the hiring of individual from different backgrounds on an equal basis, regardless of creed, ethnicity or political inclinations; and because our country (DR) is a multicultural hub where persons of mixed ethnicity, brought up within starkly unequal backgrounds in terms of access to quality education or wealth, amount to more than 75% of the country’s population, we do have a pretty diverse legal staff in terms of age range, political preferences, social class and genre. 

Embedded in the country’s culture, due to our historical background, is the tolerance towards diversification (we are used to it); and fueled by AES culture, is the respect to all professional work output, regardless of who produced it or his/her personal likes and opinions. Taking advantage of this and procuring to maximise such integration in our legal department, I normally schedule two or three quick-30 minutes meetings weekly (one pre-scheduled, the rest spontaneous), where I incite each staff member to express freely and openly, and pose as many questions as they wish. 

Additionally, I try to always promote outdoors activities for the week -the classic after-work social drink on Thursdays/Fridays being the one they prefer, almost officialised, but also going together to cinemas, playing together padel or some other sport, and/or some intellectual activities, like creating a book club for the legal staff (many of them love to read). Creating a WhatsApp group where everyone participates, different from the official WhatsApp group for work issues and topics, also has helped me a lot in integrating the team together.