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

As a team, we have had the opportunity to manage and participate in various transactions and disputes that have represented a significant challenge in our professional careers.

I have always been grateful for the opportunity to face highly complex scenarios and find the ideal paths for their resolution.

Among the most relevant, I must highlight the success in resolving a dispute with one of our main clients; first, with the deployment of an adequate procedural strategy whose favourable results led us to a highly successful negotiation table for both parties.

We were able to recover after a six-year discussion, approximately 80% of the account receivable and, most importantly, the supplier-client relationship, which has led us to scenarios of mutual collaboration for the generation of new projects of common interest. We stopped fighting to start negotiating.

How do you feel the pandemic has changed the world of work for in-house counsel and the function of the general counsel?

Working during the pandemic has been a challenge for companies. At Contugas, we have been fortunate that the company has provided us with the logistical facilities to continue with our work practically immediately, which has allowed us to have a reasonably short period of adaptation compared to other experiences about which I have had information.

The transfer from physical to virtual contact implies high-level adaptability, which fortunately, we have achieved with the collaboration of all team members. In this line, I am convinced that the pandemic has generated a total change in the way of dealing with daily work, forcing us to develop skills different from those that one is used to deploying in the traditional work style.

The management of the various means of communication, the ability to pay attention to a camera, the administration of timings between meetings, and of course, the management of personal matters when one works from home are some of the challenges that have had to be addressed.

In the case of internal lawyers, virtuality has allowed us to access a scenario where the proper attention to time can mean relatively high levels of efficiency. The other side is the challenge of maintaining personal spaces both for oneself and the members of the work teams, preventing virtuality from generating work that covers the entire worker’s schedule.

For lawyers in general, the skills of negotiation or contradiction in a physical environment differ from a virtual environment, so the platforms we use today encourage us to improve our exposure and persuasion skills and work on high-impact presentations that replace the body language of physical meetings.