Could you tell us a bit about your significant successes in your role?

Since we are a spin-off business with complex ongoing contracts, commitments, specific regulatory context, and a solid population of employees, it has been a significant challenge to give legal support to the robust organisational structure.

My main objective has been to change the nature of the lawyer’s typical role and its image within the business by being a partner from the get-go in other processes. To achieve that, I focused on expanding my mindset to have a comprehensive company vision by educating myself in different disciplines and closely accompanying other teams, such as sales, human resources, procurement and finance, to understand their needs and challenges.

My success came from developing comprehensive knowledge and being present all the way. Having the opportunity to connect with them and see things from their angle allowed me to change the interaction between the whole business and legal, becoming a strategic and trusted advisor that enables their goals as much as we clear out legal concerns.

Now I am building a journey with the organisation to maximise team experiences across the entire business and thus make the most of the team’s talent to achieve individual and collective goals.

In your opinion, what are the qualities and skills needed to form a strong legal team?

When I think of a robust and high-performance team, I think of leadership, sales enablement, building business strategies and courage to expand the organisation’s mindset. Understanding legal fundamentals is no longer enough. We must become great communicators to multiply individual talent, getting much more powerful results.

We usually think about what we need from a team, but it is even more critical to provide them with the right tools and mechanics. We can all learn and grow on our career ladder; as leaders, we need to trust and challenge our team out of their comfort zone.

Another key point that propels success is a diverse staff with different backgrounds, skills, and experience levels. That produces unique and open-minded approaches to co-create solutions.

I have been lucky enough to develop myself in a high-performing team, and I believe that brings not only thrive to the business but also sets a before and after in our careers. I guess everyone can recall a team where they felt like superheroes. That is the goal; that is how I picture a strong team.

What is the biggest risk to your industry, and how are you contributing to prepare your organisation for this?

Many companies deal with legal issues as urgent when they are already in a crisis. Spending as much time as possible putting out fires at a legal or commercial level takes away our attention from the rest of the things that happen, so we enter a vicious cycle of only attending to what we have on top of us without proper planning.

We cannot continue to respond late to the changes that are happening faster and faster; what we must do is influence the changes that occur in a timely manner to become pioneers; we need to have a proactive role when it comes to setting up new regulations for the changes we will face in the following years. It is time to harness all technologies that automate and simplify our work so we can focus our efforts on what is truly important, much like augmented intelligence.

A relevant topic in the legal sector is the series of labour reforms that took place recently. We all needed time and money to fulfil the outsourcing reform; now that we are in the same process with NOM035, we are losing focus again. We could aim for the moon and be strategic. To avoid leading the market but catalysing its transformation, we must be the dominant player regulating key evolutions coming for the next decades: Metaverse, Omniverse, Autonomous tech and so on.

I am trying to build a link between the full picture, our passions and the business strategies to stop looking for the immediate reward of great execution and start refuelling the commitment to enhance the market and our customers’ life.