What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

Recently, the team and I were involved on the due diligence of a multi-market transaction (five countries across Central America), where SBA agreed the purchase of over 7000 towers located within these five markets. This due diligence process required, among others, review thousands of contracts, litigation, environmental risks, permits, corporate information, tax and operations legal matters, including interaction with several other jurisdictions such as Luxembourg and Curazao attorneys. In addition, the team assisted with the development of over 70 telecommunications towers in Chile, Perú and Ecuador, as an effort to help our clients to carry out 5G networks across those countries.

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

From my standpoint, it is essential to stay close to all the strategic decision-making executives or officers. Nowadays, the legal function does not just review contracts, manage litigation, among other day-to-day legal operations: it needs to support business continuity, reputational integrity, and long-term sustainability. It is also key that the function anticipates possible contingencies that may arise from the crisis periods, such as reviewing if the company is up to date with all the Compliance matters and recent changes to the Laws; and reviewing key commercial contracts and the likelihood of breach from the counterparties, among others.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

One of the trends in the legal business that we’re monitoring is how the use of artificial intelligence may impact the legal function, not only from the obvious benefits that this technological tool may bring into the table, but also, on the opposite view, how it may affect the legal function. For instance, how AI may lead to errors in the legal analysis of a particular matter or in the drafting of a contract, whether a simple contract or a more complex one. Moreover, the unrestricted or unprotected use of AI may result on confidential information of the company being revealed or unintentional leaked into the cloud, web or, in general, into the public knowledge.

What is a cause, business or otherwise, that you are passionate about? Why is this?

Given my 15-year trajectory as an in-house attorney, I’ve been involved not only in the legal side of things, but also in the business side of the company. That aspect of my career meant I have naturally developed an inclination to the commercial and operational aspects of the business. Those sides of the company – which are not necessarily something that in my early steps of the career I thought I’d be part of – really call my attention and have strengthened attributes other than legal. Also, the real estate business is something that I am passionate about, considering the varieties of angles that may take and how it can affect many of the key industries of a country or market.