What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

As head of intellectual property, I lead a team that manages the trademarks for our various business units, such as marketplace, shipping and fintech, as well as the company’s domain name portfolio. We currently have a portfolio of about 1900 trademarks, 28 industrial models in Latin America, the US, China, the EU, and the UK. We also have 1520 domains, including decentralised names. We also protect our software as both trade secret and copyright. The Mercado Libre brand was recently included in Kantar’s ranking of the 71st most valuable brands in the world, making it the only Latin American brand represented in this ranking. Mercado Livre was also recognised as the most valuable brand in Brazil.

Since joining the company in 2021, we have been revising our intellectual property strategies, aiming for an efficient portfolio by focusing our efforts on the brands we really need to protect through registration and avoiding unnecessary exponential growth of the portfolio.

Do you use any “legal tech” products and do you find them a helpful management device?

As we are seeing an increasing number of infringements on social media and brand impersonation through fake social media accounts, stand-alone websites, or lookalike apps, we have recently moved to a more proactive approach by implementing software tools to detect and remove such infringing content, with exceptionally satisfactory results so far. We also have recently implemented a solution for conducting in-house trademark searches and a worldwide watch service software. We work very closely with our legal operations team to implement and improve our proceedings and tools.

How much influence do you, as a general counsel, have on the diversity and inclusions policies of your organisation?

Considerable influence, I would say. I am part of the women affinity group and contribute to the work on new strategies and policies aimed at achieving greater diversity in the workplace.