About

SAP is the world’s largest business software company and has been operating in Mexico since 1994, and in 2014 the Mexican branch of the company appointed Christian Paredes to the position of general counsel. Paredes has been at SAP México since 2007, but having excelled in the positions of senior lawyer (until 2013) and then as legal manager between 2013 and 2014, he was quickly identified as the best candidate to lead the company’s legal department. One work stream that brought his skills to the forefront of the business’ mind was the sale of a line of business in 2010 which had the complexity of negotiating the terms and conditions of the contract with the buyer and several logistic issues with different customers that were part of the agreement. Since taking his current role, Paredes has led on a number of vital projects. First, in 2016 he helped in the closing of the biggest deal in Latin America. ‘As it was a very sensitive issue, I took full control of the negotiation and another variable was that we were facing a public customer (government), hence the correct analysis and the correct words were the difference. This deal made me more analytic and allowed me to have a very complex situation under control and close the deal by the end of the day’, he explains. The following year he was instrumental in successfully defending members of the company’s C-suite in criminal proceedings. ‘This was a very complex issue because [it involved] someone’s liberty, not just possible economic damage it was covered by the media, the exposure increased but I was confident of our strategy from the beginning and finally the ruling confirmed [this]’, he says. Paredes also implemented an internal model for his legal department in 2017. Explaining the new system, he comments, ‘each member of my team has to be in charge of one internal customer, i.e. each lawyer would need to know, in a 360 degree level, a specific customer and this new support model helped my team to close big deals during 2017 and give strategic recommendations to the account executives’. With the aforementioned achievements under his belt, it is easy to understand why SAP’s hierarchy were eager to promote Parades to his current position and retain his services for over a decade.