About

Managing a team of 20 professionals in her role as general counsel for Walmart Argentina, Brenda Puig has provided the Argentine subsidiary of the world’s largest company with excellent leadership and consistent safeguarding against the diverse issues it faces in the country. ‘Puig is well-known in the market for being a versatile lawyer, with vast experience and knowledge of the retail market. Consistently, she has a high profile in her industry’, one nominator says. Puig joined Walmart Argentina in 2005 as a senior counsel, in charge of the labour and employment team within the legal department. Being proactive, she gradually added new responsibilities to her role, until she was appointed general counsel and chief ethics and compliance officer in 2011. Describing her role as general counsel, Puig comments, ‘during the last years our department has gone through major transformations, from new ways of working such as re-defining and standardising processes to the use of technology, specifically systems. This attitude towards change has allowed the legal department to stay relevant for the business and add value’. For the past three years, Puig and her team have made a substantial contribution in dealing with litigation and transaction matters. She explains: ‘In the retail industry we face litigation of many kinds. The major litigations we have managed in the last few years are related to labour and employment matters, as well as real estate and consumer defence, including some class actions. Regarding transactions, during the last year we successfully completed the sale of our small format division to Dia, as well as some other smaller ones’. Before embarking on her in-house career, Puig had been working for M & M Bomchil (now Bomchil) for seven years in Buenos Aires, focusing on labour, employment and M&A. She found the experience to be ‘extremely demanding, these law firms are great in preparing a lawyer’. Puig regards her move to the in-house industry as one of the highlights of her legal career. ‘Working for a company is very different from being a lawyer, it requires you to develop completely different skills and add up nicely to the law firm experience. Even better, the company I was lucky enough to join was Walmart. It’s a huge and great global company, which has offered me uncountable ways of growing and developing myself. Learning the business, being part of international projects and just being part of Walmart is a guarantee of being at the forefront of the business world’. In a separate lane to her legal responsibility, Puig has been developing herself as a diversity and inclusion leader for the market for the past 10 years, which she says has given her ‘a broader view of the business and has allowed me to develop different skills’.