Team size: 5 Legal and Compliance Managers

What piece of work or project over the past year are you most proud of, and why was it particularly significant for the business?

Over the past year, I am most proud of the continued transformation and consolidation of our Legal & Compliance model across Mexico, Central America and the Andean region, covering 12 business entities across multiple jurisdictions. The challenge was not simply to expand legal coverage, but to build a model capable of operating consistently across markets with very different levels of complexity, maturity and local resources.

We moved towards a more integrated regional structure, combining specialised expertise with strong local business ownership. This included further developing centres of expertise in compliance, product and marketing law, and business law, while creating clearer interfaces between Legal & Compliance, Procurement, Finance and the business. At the same time, the model had to operate effectively within a highly matrixed organisation, translating and implementing Emerging Markets and Global priorities while preserving the flexibility required to address local business and regulatory realities.

The significance for the organisation has been broader than legal risk management. The objective has been to make Legal & Compliance a more predictable, scalable and commercially relevant partner: one that helps the business move faster while ensuring that decision-making remains well governed and aligned with the wider organisation.

This work has also required balancing day-to-day business support with complex litigation, regulatory matters, compliance investigations and major strategic projects across multiple jurisdictions, as well as government and institutional engagement where dedicated capabilities are not locally available. For me, the greatest achievement has been building a team and operating model capable of managing all of these dimensions simultaneously while remaining closely connected to the business.

Have you been involved in any initiatives to improve legal processes, introduce new ways of working or make the legal function more efficient?

I believe time is one of the scarcest resources in any legal function, so I constantly challenge the way we work and look for ways to make good decision-making more repeatable, scalable and efficient.

With a relatively lean team supporting multiple markets, the answer cannot be to involve Legal in every issue. It has to be to design systems and ways of working that create greater autonomy, predictability and consistency, while ensuring that Legal & Compliance focuses its time where judgment and business context matter most.

A good example is contract lifecycle management. I led its implementation across Emerging Markets within the company’s global framework. The opportunity has been not only to deploy the technology, but to progressively standardise the ways of working around it. This remains a work in progress and has required significant stakeholder engagement and change management across Legal & Compliance, Procurement, Finance and the business to improve adoption, clarity and efficiency.

We apply the same logic more broadly by identifying work that is repetitive or standardisable and determining what can be enabled through self-service, automation, data and increasingly artificial intelligence. The objective is simple: create scalable solutions across affiliates and preserve legal capacity for the decisions where we add the greatest value.

What excites you most about the future of the in-house legal profession, and where do you hope to continue developing your career?

What excites me most is the continued evolution of the in-house lawyer from legal adviser to strategic business leader.

Technology, data and artificial intelligence will increasingly transform how legal work is performed, particularly in repetitive and standardisable areas. The opportunity is not simply to do the same work faster, but to rethink how legal functions allocate their most valuable resource: time.

At the same time, technology alone will not define the legal function of the future. Teams and their capabilities will need to evolve with it. Legal professionals will increasingly need to combine strong legal judgment with commercial understanding, stakeholder management, adaptability and the ability to influence decisions across complex organisations.

I believe the strongest legal functions will combine technology, scalable ways of working and high-performing teams, allowing lawyers to spend less time on work that can be standardised and more time on complex judgment, strategic decisions and genuine business partnership.

Looking ahead, I want to continue developing as a regional and international legal leader, building Legal & Compliance organisations that are commercially relevant, technology-enabled and capable of continuously evolving with the business.