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Career Biography

Angélica Huacuja is Associate General Counsel for Latin America at Uber, where she leads the legal team supporting the company’s Mobility, Delivery and Advertising businesses across the region. In this role, she oversees a broad range of legal matters, including regulatory, litigation, labour and employment, commercial and product, competition, and strategic transactions.

Since joining Uber in 2017, Angélica has held a number of leadership roles across the Legal organisation. She joined as a litigation lawyer and, in 2019, transitioned to lead Labour & Employment for Spanish-speaking Latin America. In 2021, she became Director of Labour & Employment for the entire LATAM region, and in 2025 was promoted to Senior Director, becoming the first person to hold that level within Uber’s LATAM Legal team.

Throughout her career at Uber, Angélica has played a leading role in some of the company’s most complex legal and regulatory matters, particularly those concerning the future of platform work. Her work has included developing legal strategies around worker classification, engaging with governments on emerging regulatory frameworks, proposing innovative approaches to social protection for independent workers, and helping the business adapt as regulation evolves across the region.

Angélica is also committed to developing diverse and inclusive organisations and mentoring women as they advance in their careers. Her leadership roles at Uber have included serving as LATAM Lead for Parents@Uber, participating in the CLO Inclusive Culture Strike Team, and serving as Global Executive Co-Sponsor of Interfaith@Uber.

Before joining Uber, Angélica practised dispute resolution and international arbitration at Hogan Lovells in Mexico City and New York. She holds a law degree from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, where she co-founded the Harvard International Arbitration Law Students Association. She is admitted to practise law in Mexico and New York.

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

Our LATAM Legal team supports Uber’s Mobility, Delivery and Advertising businesses across a highly diverse and constantly evolving region. One of the things that makes our work particularly complex is that, in many of our markets, the regulatory framework is effectively being written while we operate. Our businesses therefore need to continuously adapt to new laws, regulations, court decisions and evolving interpretations by authorities in a highly competitive market, often while continuing to innovate and grow at significant scale.

A major focus over the past year has been the evolution of regulation around platform work. In Mexico, for example, we supported the implementation of a landmark reform extending social security protections to platform workers while seeking to preserve the flexibility and independence that are fundamental to the platform model. This required translating an entirely new legal framework into an operating model at significant scale, while the interpretation and practical application of the regulation continued to evolve.

We have also been involved in significant litigation and regulatory matters across the region concerning the legal status of platform workers and transportation regulation at airports. In Brazil, questions around the classification of platform workers have reached the Supreme Court, with the potential to shape the legal framework governing platform work and the broader digital economy. In Mexico, we have spearheaded a litigation strategy challenging restrictions on rideshare pickups at airports in the absence of a clear regulatory framework, seeking to preserve drivers’ ability to access these important earning opportunities and riders’ ability to use the transportation option of their choice.

Beyond litigation and regulation, our team supports the launch of new products and business models, strategic transactions and Uber’s continued growth across LATAM. In this environment, our role is not simply to identify legal risks. It is to anticipate where the law is heading, help shape solutions as regulatory frameworks evolve, and enable the business to innovate and grow responsibly.

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

In periods of instability, my north star is always **doing the right thing**: for our drivers, our riders, our merchants and our employees. That does not mean there is always an obvious or risk-free answer. Often, these stakeholders have competing interests. However, having that north star helps anchor decision-making when the legal, political or business environment becomes uncertain.

From there, I focus on three things: clarity, prioritisation and optionality.

Legal teams can easily become overwhelmed by everything that could go wrong. Our job is to distinguish what is truly material from the noise, understand the potential business impact, and give leadership a clear view of the available options, their respective risks and their consequences for the people who rely on our platform.

I also believe strongly that Legal should not become an additional source of paralysis during a crisis. Our role is not simply to say whether something is legally risky. It is to help the business understand what risk it is taking, what can be done to mitigate it, and what alternatives exist. Particularly in LATAM, where political, regulatory and economic conditions can change quickly, preserving optionality is critical.

Finally, resilience depends on trust built before a crisis occurs. We invest heavily in relationships with our business, policy, communications and operational partners so that, when difficult situations arise, Legal is already part of the decision making process. The best crisis management happens when Legal is not reacting from the sidelines, but helping shape the strategy from the beginning.

Ultimately, resilience is not just about protecting the organisation from risk. It is about navigating uncertainty without losing sight of who we are and who our decisions affect. For me, that always comes back to doing the right thing.

AND choose two or three of the questions from the list below to answer:

General counsel often speak of the need to be strategic to reach the pinnacle of the profession. What does being strategic mean to you?

To me, being strategic starts with understanding the business well enough to know which legal issues actually matter. In-house lawyers will always face more risks and questions than an organisation can realistically address with the same level of attention. The ability to distinguish signal from noise is therefore critical.

Being strategic also means looking beyond the immediate legal question. What is the business trying to achieve? What is the business solving for? What are the real consequences of each option? Where is the regulatory environment heading? A strong in-house lawyer should anticipate issues rather than simply react to them and be able to simplify legal complexity into clear choices that business leaders can act upon.

I don’t believe Legal’s role is to eliminate risk. Businesses need to take risks to innovate and grow. Our responsibility is to make sure those risks are understood, deliberate and appropriately mitigated. Sometimes the most strategic advice is not “yes” or “no,” but presenting several paths forward, explaining the trade-offs, making a recommendation and helping the business make an informed decision.

Ultimately, being strategic means moving from answering legal questions to helping shape business outcomes.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

Judgment, curiosity and self-awareness are among the attributes I value most.

Self-awareness is particularly important. Confidence is essential for an in-house lawyer, especially when advising senior leaders or navigating difficult situations, but confidence without self-awareness is a liability. You need to believe in your judgment while recognising that you might be wrong, that we all have biases, that there are two sides to every story and that there is something to learn from everyone around us.

That requires a genuine growth mindset. The strongest lawyers I have worked with actively seek feedback and are able to receive it without becoming defensive. Equally important, particularly as you become a leader, is being willing to give candid feedback. I believe being direct is ultimately much kinder and more useful than sugar-coating a message that someone needs in order to grow.

Finally, curiosity matters enormously. The best in-house lawyers are not necessarily those who always have the answer. They are often the ones who, before jumping to a conclusion, instinctively seek to understand another point of view and remain open to changing their minds. They stay intellectually curious about the law, the business, and, perhaps most importantly, the people around them.

For me, the goal is to combine confidence with humility: have the courage to express a point of view, the self-awareness to question it, and the willingness to keep learning.