About

With a strong background in the telecommunications sector, (he was formerly in house counsel at both Telecom Argentina and Telecom Personal), Gonzalo García Lussardi has been regional counsel for Tyco Argentina since late 2007. His responsibilities cover all legal, regulatory, public affairs and compliance matters across Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Paraguay and Uruguay. Since he joined, he has overhauled the legal department’s procedures, standardizing and simplifying the processes for attending internal clients, introducing software to permit ongoing case management, and establishing a metrics-based “control & report panel” so as to facilitate real time monitoring of the department’s activity (and its correction as necessary). Among notable achievements, he regards his role in ‘the strategic planning and execution of a defence’ in the face of a number of litigations ‘whose size threatened the company’s future in one jurisdiction’. Concurrently, he regards it as precisely this opportunity to collaborate actively in the design and implementation of business strategies in differing jurisdictions as among the most rewarding aspects of his role. While noting that law firms continue to fall short in terms of ‘speaking the “language” of business’ and fully ‘partnering with general counsel’, he suggests they should ‘focus a little more on opportunities and a little less on risk’. He also believes that in-house practitioners have additional work to do, notably in terms of the depth of their grasp of financial language ‘so as to be capable of understanding and gauging the economic impact of the advice we give’, and also to improve their capability ‘to communicate complex technical knowledge in simple and effective terms’.