About

‘As part of the board of directors of the company and the director of legal affairs, my role is to deliver the most wise advice possible to our CEO for any of the key decisions that we face, both in strategic or key operative matters. I am also responsible for helping my peers and allowing each team member to accomplish corporate goals’. Providing this support to Argentine biotechnology company Biosidus, Josefina Hernández Gazcón is praised for having ‘strong experience’ in all aspects of the law, including complex international M&A transactions, alongside her organisational skills. As a member of the company’s board of directors, she is keen to provide input from a legal perspective but also to ‘challenge the status quo and set new rules for our teams’. With a strong emphasis on business knowledge and promoting proximity to colleagues in other functions, Hernández says the legal team ‘know our internal clients very well, the challenges that each team has and the challenges of the company’ and so acts with ‘responsibility, matureness and wisdom’ to solve them. During her time at Biosidus she has made several structural changes in the department, taking a proactive approach to reorganisation and selecting appropriate talent in key roles. She also created a help-desk system, including a mobile app, so the entire company is able to access internal legal assistance at any time, making legal staff ‘close and reachable’ to business colleagues. This innovation gave her the ability to analyse data about the use of time and resource, enabling her to better understand ‘how many questions our teams make, which department requires more attention, which one is not being advised enough, what are the real costs of legal advice and which one of our lawyers is dealing exactly with what’. Hernández has also identified key performance indicators by which the team can be managed and assessed, which she states ‘was not an easy thing to do’ and further demonstrates her ability to ascertain the value of the legal department within the context of her organisation.