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

I would like to mention the work we have done in 2025, together with the other Scotiabank legal teams in International Banking, to standardise the teams’ operational models and establish similar standards in terms of efficiency and modernisation, introducing digital tools in the execution of our legal services. This has required dedication, coordination, and leadership from the teams to share our best practices, to agree on which ones should be applied, and define the best standards in terms of operations, documentation, and technological tools. Key to this task has been the work developed in previous years in Chile, when we introduced various digital tools, allowing us to be highly efficient in terms of service standard and volume. 

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

We are facing times of change. Regulatory frameworks are rapidly changing in the financial industry, with regulatory initiatives to face fraud, data protection laws, open finance, and other regulatory introductions, which require us to understand where we stand up to build the new. It is important to anticipate, adapt, and act transparently in the process and know how to address it. We must play an active role and participate when we are asked to comment on regulations and how they impact us. Legal management should not be reactive or isolated: it must be integrated into the organisational strategy to serve as a lever for resilience, not a hindrance.  

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?

Technology has had a very significant and positive impact, allowing us to tackle more work in less time and at a lower cost, with the same personnel effort of the team and without overloading it, preserving the balance. I would like to mention that our team is smaller than it was ten years ago, but the bank has tripled in size. During this transition, we turned into a centralised service, providing the legal service to the abnk in all the branches of the country. We were able to do this by digitalising a significant portion of the services and, using AI tools, addressing the increased volume with the same team and with improved time and better-quality standards and savings.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?  

The process of centralising the country’s legal services in Santiago and being able to manage three times the workload by incorporating technological tools without increasing the team size. In 2014, when I took over as team leader, we lacked visibility into what was happening in the regional branches, and the legal services we provided had very long turnaround times and were not digitalised. Implementing process simplification and driving a change in the way we began issuing legal reports and responding to the courts — all centralised and digitalised—required coordination, leadership, and team motivation. This allowed us to control and manage 100% of legal services, and we began to provide them very efficiently and with reduced time and costs. The way we work eleven years later is very different from how we did then.