Team Size: 15

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

Strategic legal leadership during transformation requires reimagining law as a business enabler, not just as a tool for risk management. As Colombia navigates complex energy transition dynamics, our team has positioned Ocensa’s legal strategy as the backbone of our operational resilience, transforming potential disruptions into strategic opportunity creation.

Our approach centers on building adaptive contractual frameworks that enable the company to pivot from the current landscape of midstream operations to the emerging energy transition demands, while protecting its core sustainability commitments. These two main priorities have served well not just our broader business strategy, but the whole corporate, institutional and socioecological network in which we operate, building trust and fostering partnerships and collaborations across diverse scales, geographies and stakeholders.

In short, our legal strategy delivers operational certainty and high standards in an uncertain environment, a critical value proposition for our clients and shareholders in Colombia’s energy sector. In this way, Ocensa has maintained its track-record of safe, efficient, and responsible operations, uninterrupted for more than 30 years, during multiple economic cycles, political transitions, and social challenges.

What are the major cases or transactions you have been involved in recently?

Recent transactions demonstrate how forward-thinking legal strategy enables sustainable value creation.

First, the acquisition of Repsol’s stake in Oleoducto de Colombia represents a key consolidation that advances the Midstream’s role within Ecopetrol Group’s broader transformation strategy.

Second, our legal team has led comprehensive legal restructuring of Ocensa’s operational framework. Anticipating a required rebalancing in the Ecopetrol Group’s Midstream operations, new innovative maintenance agreements will provide the availability, flexibility, and technological leverage required for Ocensa’s evolving role in energy transition and national energy security, incorporating advanced asset management technologies and processes.

Third, we have accelerated the expansion of Ocensa’s renewable energy capabilities through power purchase agreements for solar parks in Coveñas and Vasconia (12+ MWh capacity), creating an integrated and low-carbon Midstream energy surplus monetisation framework that is as of this year fully operational.

By integrating M&A, next-generation maintenance contracts and innovative partnerships for renewable energy expansion, these initiatives showcase how as general counsels we can contribute with frameworks that transform some of our times’ most pressing challenges into market evolution and business opportunities.

What measures has your company taken to embed sustainability practices into its core business operations, and how does the role of the general counsel contribute to driving and ensuring sustainable practices within the company?

At Ocensa, we view sustainability as a competitive advantage at the core of our business, rather than as an overhead. By leveraging contract law and deep knowledge of the regulatory framework, we carefully architect the contractual and internal policy frameworks at the base of our sustainability excellence across some of Colombia’s most complex geographical and social landscapes.

And however important this is, we remain convinced that true impact is achieved through an integrated management of intangibles. At Ocensa, we focus on integrity and trust as key organisational assets, underpinning the full stack of sustainability goals. Having corporate communications and public relations traditionally under the purview of the general counsels has been essential to build and maintain this consensus across the organisation.

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments?

The most transformative emerging technology reshaping the legal profession today is of course Generative AI, as is the case almost universally in the knowledge economy. The main question today as general counsels is how to shape and direct these new capabilities together with advanced data analytics and business intelligence platforms, to enable legal departments to evolve in sync with core safety values, data protection, cybersecurity compliance and knowledge and information governance.

To stay current with these rapidly evolving technologies, I prioritise hands-on implementation over passive observation, actively piloting emerging legal tech solutions, collaborating directly with vendors and innovation teams, participating in legal technology conferences and forums, and most importantly, measuring concrete ROI on technological investments to distinguish genuine innovation from mere trends.

This practical approach ensures we’re not just aware of emerging technologies but are strategically deploying them to deliver measurable value to our organisation. As an example, I would cite our new litigation management model, that leverages AI and data analytics to characterise, quantify, and visualise judicial processes. This transformation has allowed us to move beyond traditional case-by-case management to comprehensive portfolio analysis that drives informed risk assessment and decision-making, with very promising outcomes.