What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

My team and I primarily support the network business across Latin America and the Caribbean where we have seen the business expand greatly over the last few years, licensing many new card issuers and merchant acquirers. We draft and negotiate the license agreements and provide guidance related to implementation where needed. There has been a significant increase in volume and complexity of these commercial deals in the last year especially and we’ve had to be creative and innovative in finding ways to create new intake forms and templates and leverage other types of efficiencies so we can continue to deliver top notch legal work product within very constrained timeframes.

Additionally, my team and I support the business in implementing new regulations and in understanding proposed regulations and how they may affect our business. New regulations can present challenges on all fronts, from legal and operational to commercial and technical, and my team thankfully has a regional and global breadth of experience to draw from, in order to provide pragmatic and actionable guidance as new regulations come into force in additional jurisdictions.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

The most important thing an in-house lawyer can do to build a strong relationship with business partners is to learn about the business. We need to be able to speak the language of the business team, to clearly articulate legal risks in business terms so the potential impacts are clearly understood, and our business partners can make well-informed decisions. If we speak in legal jargon and do not understand potential commercial, operational and technical impacts or limitations, our guidance will fall flat and may not be understood or even be relevant in some cases.

Another important consideration is trust. It takes time and effort to build trust with business partners and we need to do it intentionally because trust between lawyers and business partners is fundamental. Of course, casual conversations over coffee about hobbies or common interests help build more personal connections that foster trust, but more concretely, we must learn to get buy in from our business partners. We need to first engage in an open conversation with them to identify and agree on the issues at hand before we can offer our guidance on possible solutions. Key to this process is exploring what our business partners are thinking and what is important to them before we dive in with advice that may miss the mark.