Global e-commerce and cloud computing giant Amazon hired Ana Buitrago in 2012, shortly after it launched its Spanish store Amazon.es and its first logistic site in Spain. As legal director and associate general counsel for Spain she currently leads the company’s Spain legal team. She combines this with leading EU legal pricing practice, overseeing cross-EU and global projects in this area since 2017. Before that, she led Amazon’s EU marketing legal practice.

Buitrago has impressed at Amazon by defining and implementing its existing legal policies and strategies, simplifying internal processes and launching the pan-EU Amazon marketing guidelines and other pan-EU and worldwide business initiatives, mainly in the marketing and pricing fields. Buitrago is also praised by nominators for developing brilliant technical solutions to complex issues: ‘She has accommodated several Amazon global services and products to Spanish consumer and trade laws and regulations without material changes and no legal challenge so far’.

Another nominator shares how Buitrago has impressed through the formation of the legal department; creating a ‘super-efficient team of only seven members (five lawyers, one paralegal and one legal assistant) to cover multiple areas both in Spain and abroad [they] launched automated legal training, including online support, for business self-service, and a training certification program for new joiners’. Buitrago also created the legal team at her previous employers Iberdrola Renovables, where she was general counsel for almost ten years. She had the following to say about her experience in creating these elite legal functions: ‘Both in Iberdrola Renovables and Amazon, I was the first member of the legal team. Upon my arrival, I recruited all members of the legal team and take pride in the growth and consolidation of highly efficient and mature teams that excel in several areas of practice and have been recognised by prestigious international awards’.

At Iberdrola Renovables, she also participated in its IPO and acted as secretary of the board for two years. ‘As a result, I became responsible for the corporate governance of an IBEX35 listed company and got tons of experience in the relevant area of corporate governance and compliance’, she says. Further demonstrating her credentials, Buitrago supported the international expansion of Iberdrola Renovables and also Terra Lycos, coordinating legal teams across Spain, the US and Latin America in both positions at ‘high speed and with great efficiency’.

She says this experience ‘moulded me as a legal project manager with large expertise in working with cross-border teams and transactions in several legal and regional areas’. Buitrago is rightly considered amongst Spain’s top in-house lawyers, and gives back to the legal community in the country as a professor since 2013 on various LLM programmes at Centro de Estudios Garrigues.