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

OpenStore aims to provide instant liquidity to Shopify-based e-commerce entrepreneurs. As such, M&A was a natural space for us to look for innovation early on. With the help of our world-class engineering team, we were able to create a due diligence and M&A platform that streamlines and automates the acquisition process. This has allowed us to acquire merchants at an accelerated pace while minimizing the risk of human error associated with old fashioned diligence procedures. The cross functional interplay between legal, finance and engineering to effectively productive M&A is the type of stimulating work that really excites me as an in-house lawyer.

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

I believe that a strong sense of curiosity combined with honest interactions with your peers is the best way to build relationships and spark mutual learning. This requires you to put yourself in the shoes of a marketer or a product manager and view problems from their perspective, in addition to speaking up and admitting you don’t know, if there is a concept from your peer’s function that you don’t understand. Then it is on you to educate yourself as quickly as possible on that subject. This also requires gratuitous teaching of legal concepts, so that you can establish a two-way relationship rooted in mutual learning that benefits both the individuals involved and ultimately, the company.

As a Florida-based in-house lawyer, how has the relationship between the state, Latin America, and the Caribbean influenced your company’s practices in recent years?

In my previous role, I was director and senior counsel at the SoftBank Latin America Fund, so I have had significant contact with Latin America being based here in Miami. The biggest impact that I have witnessed is the opening up of recruiting opportunities for US-based technology companies of Latin American talent, particularly on the engineering and data science side. With Miami as a natural hub between the US and Latin America, this pool of talent only adds to the attractiveness of Miami as a centre for technology and innovation.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most? Which have you found most useful in your legal team?

We were able to leverage our incredible engineering and data science teams to develop proprietary solutions updating outdated, clunky M&A procedures, such as the sending back and forth of a due diligence request list, or the explaining of complicated legal concepts to counter parties to facilitate diligence that previously would’ve required a call. I am fortunate to have world-class engineering resources at my fingertips, as our team works entirely out of our Miami office. In this way, we are also at the forefront of the Miami tech movement, championed by our CEO, Keith Rabois.