Team size: 63

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

In 2025, we supported the company through significant challenges and key achievements, strengthening capabilities, accelerating talent development and reinforcing our role as a strategic business partner. We enabled the execution of the growth plan while building an ecosystem focused on meeting evolving customer needs, balancing day-to-day legal support and complex litigation with high impact strategic projects. Operating across Central America, our regional and local teams collaborated closely to navigate regulatory complexity, align perspectives and deliver consistent, value driven legal support across the business.

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

During periods of instability or crisis, I focus on leading with calm, clarity and structure to guide the organisation through uncertainty. The first and most critical step is to fully understand the situation: listening carefully, assessing facts and context and distinguishing real from perceived risks before moving into solutions. In a VUCA environment, resilience is built not by reacting quickly, but by responding thoughtfully.

Effective leadership in these moments requires the ability to connect the dots and translate complex, high-pressure situations into clear, actionable and business-oriented solutions. This demands judgment, continuous risk assessment and the capacity to support difficult decisions with confidence, integrity and transparency.

At the same time, it is important to lead the legal team as one cohesive unit — aligned, empowered and adaptable. Through targeted training, strong collaboration and a clear way of working, which combines ownership with a cross-functional focus on talent, technology and agility, the legal function can respond effectively while supporting long-term growth mind set even through difficult situations.

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

A general counsel must assess the different scenarios and situations that arise from a holistic perspective — one that balances risk, the regulatory framework and business expectations. This often requires navigating between strategy, tactics and operations, and deliberately calibrating the appropriate level of involvement in each.

Being strategic starts with a deep understanding of the business: its structure, functions, departments, key metrics and the interactions across the organisation. It also requires a clear grasp of the external environment in which the business operates, including the customers it serves and the markets it addresses.

Based on the above, the general counsel becomes a true business advisor, someone who understands the regulatory landscape and aligns business ambitions with legal realities, enabling viable and sustainable outcomes. Close engagement with key stakeholders is essential, as is having a voice at decision making and negotiation tables. This ensures that projects are designed from the outset with legal insight embedded and negotiations framed appropriately — what we refer to as “partnership by design.”

Finally, the in-house lawyer must go beyond traditional legal expertise. This role demands continuous development of soft skills and technical competencies, as well as the ability to anticipate emerging needs, identify new methodologies and bring insights from other markets into the organisation to create value and foresight for the business.

Have you had any experiences during your career as a lawyer that stand out as particularly unique or interesting?

From the beginning of my career, I have worked as a corporate lawyer, advising companies and their businesses across different stages of development. One of the most defining experiences in my professional journey was the opportunity to grow in an area outside the traditional legal career path, which I experienced at Walmart when I moved into an operational role.

Around 2018 to 2019, I was responsible for the operation of the bodegas and discount format in Costa Rica. This represented a significant 180-degree shift that not only challenged my functional scope, but also strengthened my agility and adaptability as a professional. This experience in operations — as we internally refer to leading the stores’ function — gave me a much closer and more realistic perspective of the business and its needs: a deeper understanding of the customer, the speed at which decisions must be made, and the day-to-day reality of our store associates.

That operational exposure continues to shape the way I advise and lead the legal function today, allowing me to deliver more informed, practical and business-oriented legal support.

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

In today’s environment, the in-house counsel must act as a trusted and strategic business partner. At the core of this role is adaptability: the ability to remain composed under pressure, respond with agility to complexity and convert uncertainty into concrete opportunities, always within a sound legal framework and integrity.

This requires strong critical thinking skills to connect the dots, create clarity and define actionable paths forward, while maintaining continuous risk assessment and a risk-aware mindset. At the same time, as technology and artificial intelligence advance at an accelerated pace, the modern in-house lawyer must understand digital tools and integrate them responsibly into decision making — anticipating risks, driving efficiencies, and delivering tangible business impact.

Equally important is a mindset of humility and continuous learning, coupled with strong collaboration across teams. Clear, direct, assertive and authentic communication — grounded in an understanding of diverse perspectives — is essential to influence effectively, align expectations and elevate organisational culture. Ultimately, the balance between technical excellence, servant leadership and thoughtful use of technology will define the modern in-house counsel and enable the creation of sustainable value in environments of constant change.