About

Currently associate general counsel for the Intelsat Corporation, Gonzalo de Dios has over 20 years’ engagement with the telecommunications sector, much of it with particular relation to Latin America. Moving in-house as regulatory counsel at Winstar Communications in 1999 (after five years in private practice), his responsibilities included all regulatory aspects of the company’s fixed-wireless broadband operations (such as spectrum allocation, frequency authorizations, service licenses and operational activities) as well as international lobbying and government regulations. He subsequently moved to PanAmSat Corporation as counsel and director of regulatory affairs, where in addition to responsibility for regulatory matters concerning the company’s Latin American satellite operations, he also coordinated institutional relations and supported operational, corporate, contractual, and tax matters throughout the region. Today, as Intelstat’s associate general counsel, his regulatory responsibilities are global but he remains the principal legal interface for the company’s joint-venture operations in both Brazil and Mexico. Since his arrival he has sought to standardize the manner in which regulatory matters are attended to and, given the importance of regulation to the communications and telephony sector, involved the legal department directly in the company’s key business units so as anticipate both legal and regulatory issues. Proud of an unblemished compliance record in the diverse jurisdictions for which he has responsibility, he regards the greatest challenge in his role as leading on complex questions that are not primarily legal in nature. ‘It’s a constant challenge but at the same time it opens the possibility of learning something new’. He regards success in the in-house role as depending upon ‘one’s ability to understand and measure the risks that can affect the operations or strategic planning of the business’, and to this end he sees it as necessary for law firms to ‘increase the opportunities for their associates to work with legal personnel in house’, so as to increase the value they represent to (future) clients. This in turn should simply be one aspect of firm’s attempts to develop an offering more truly suited to clients’ needs.