SAS Institute, the US multinational analytical software developer, is a company that continues to expand its presence outside its home market. The growth of SAS in Latin America is overseen by a talented multijurisdictional legal team. As part of a well-balanced legal structure, head legal counsel Dr. Federico Frachia Sabaris holds responsibility for a team covering Argentina, Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay. Explaining the company’s immense faith in the team, Frachia says, ‘SAS gives autonomy and trust to all of its lawyers, searching the market for intelligent leaders with new ideas.

The community of lawyers work back-to-back, in constant communication but with full autonomy to achieve goals’. Having a direct report to SAS’s legal directors in Brazil and Canada, Frachia highlights the implementation of new software within the legal team as a factor that has allowed it to run even more efficiently: ‘We are working on adapting an online automated contract enforceable in any jurisdiction, which represent a large effort given the different legislation across jurisdictions of the globe. The ACE (short for Automated Contract Entry) should help to reduce time around legal negotiations’. One of the most important aspects to the team’s work is communication across different teams, which Frachia explains is ‘extremely necessary’ to obtain any good legal result. He states: ‘The key to obtaining better results for the corporation, is not only to observe the legal perspective of the matter in concern, but to work in constant and fluent communication with the country managers and other different areas’.

This is to ‘detect, understand and visualise the healthiest outcome of any situations and move the correct pieces on the board’. Highlighted in helping achieve this is the country manager for Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay and Uruguay Gustavo Gutman. On explaining the ethos behind the team’s success in delivering for the business, Frachia says: ‘Great achievements are nurtured through the cooperation of many minds with a common vision working toward a common goal’.