About

Head legal counsel at AviancaTaca since 2012, Desirée Orsini has played a significant role in the growth of the Peruvian airline industry. Formerly chief counsel at Lan Perú for over six years, where she not only built the legal department from scratch but also developed a ticket payment system facilitating the buying of airline tickets by those in the informal sector previously without access to air travel, thereby boosting both the company and the sector as a whole. Her tenure at the company also coincided with extensive modification of Peru’s regulatory framework, not least in the labour sector, resulting in a requirement to undertake collective bargaining with five newly instituted unions within the company. Orsini defines the in-house experience as being characterised by ‘a permanent learning process’, not only as a result of the legislative developments in Peru over the last decade, but also from being ‘permanently surround by professionals and specialists from different disciplines and backgrounds, who see the same situation from completely distinct perspectives’. Despite the challenges of being ‘constantly pushed out of one’s comfort zone’, she regards her key role as being that of ‘a facilitator’, and takes both pride and satisfaction in ‘seeing processes through to their practical conclusion and seeing how they impact positively on the company’s results.’ Her other experience includes spells in the public sector (at Peruvian intellectual property entity, INDECOPI) and in private practice (Estudio Ferrero), as well as in-house at Banco Sudamericano.