Team size: 6

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

From a legal standpoint, instability and crisis imply heightened exposure — to market volatility, to opportunistic behaviour by contractors or service providers, to shifting legal frameworks, and to unpredictable conduct from government officials. Our natural legal response is to develop mechanisms that allow rapid decision-making while maintaining legal discipline.

This includes strengthening legal language across all contracts and documentation — favouring clarity and precision over interpretive or ambiguous provisions. We also emphasise traceability by ensuring all critical legal actions are formally recorded and registrable, and we adopt a more cautious and conservative position during negotiations.

One drawback of this approach is the potential rigidity it introduces, which may conflict with the more commercially driven, risk-tolerant strategies often pursued by executive leadership. To mitigate this, we maintain direct, consistent, and effective communication between the legal department and strategic management. By “effective”, I mean ensuring that strategic leaders fully understand the legal risks tied to major transactions, and the role we play in minimising potential impacts.

Ultimately, it’s about establishing a balance: determining how much legal risk the organisation is willing — or able — to assume in pursuit of its business objectives. We work to transform reactive crisis management into a long-term risk mitigation strategy. This is how we align legal strategy with broader corporate goals: through (i) intensive communication and (ii) a comprehensive understanding of the legal landscape and the rapid legal developments occurring in a crisis-affected environment.

This enables us to elevate legal awareness across the organisation and position our legal team not as obstructive “deal-breakers”, but as essential risk managers tailoring every transaction to ensure acceptable, well-defined legal risk exposure.

Given the current geopolitical shifts and growing uncertainties around international free trade, has your company’s risk profile evolved, and are you taking measures to address these challenges?

Absolutely — our risk profile has become increasingly conservative and risk-averse in response to global geopolitical shifts and the evolving trade landscape. This shift has driven several internal measures, including cost-reduction initiatives such as workforce restructuring. While these actions have been challenging, particularly in terms of morale, maintaining investor confidence remains critical for a publicly traded company such as AES.

From a legal standpoint, we are reassessing key contract clauses across the board — including those on force majeure, taxation, governing law, and arbitration. We are also negotiating more flexible terms with suppliers — for example, allowing sourcing from multiple regions or introducing mechanisms to rebalance contracts if execution becomes commercially unreasonable — to de-risk procurement and strengthen supply chain resilience.

Simultaneously, we are enhancing communication with government agencies, providing them with additional support and information to ensure our corporate policies and operations remain aligned with shifting regulatory expectations. This also positions us favourably in strategic negotiations regarding new regulations, and allows us to better anticipate sudden legal or policy changes.

Proactive monitoring and foresight are now fundamental to our legal strategy — ensuring the business remains agile and prepared for the unexpected.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?

Our primary reason for engaging external counsel is access to specialised legal expertise. External firms often bring deeper insights — particularly in cross-border transactions or complex regulatory matters — and can offer valuable benchmarking across jurisdictions and sectors, which internal teams may not always possess.

That said, confidentiality remains a major consideration. While external providers are legally bound by confidentiality obligations, sharing sensitive or strategic internal information with third parties still carries inherent risk. To address this, we follow strict engagement protocols (including NDAs) and often adopt hybrid models, combining external subject-matter expertise with robust internal oversight.

When it comes to evaluating external legal services, our criteria vary depending on the nature of the engagement:

For litigation and arbitration: Results matter most. We favour timely and reasonable settlements over prolonged legal disputes that could attract public scrutiny and drive up costs.

For legal opinions and strategic advice: Effectiveness is measured by the quality of decisions informed by that advice, and how successfully risk has been mitigated.

For regulatory, permitting, and real estate matters: We assess responsiveness, turnaround time, and the accuracy and thoroughness with which the firm handles the regulatory process.

Ultimately, the objective is to ensure that external counsel enhances — rather than duplicates — our internal capabilities, while aligning with the organisation’s strategic priorities.