About

Working as senior legal officer at one of the world leaders in impact investing, Finance in Motion, Alejandra Pazos is a sole in-house counsel working in the company office in Bogotá and reports to the legal director based at the company headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. The position that Pazos currently holds represents the first time the company ventured into having a member of the legal team working off-site in one of the company’s regional offices. ‘Before this, the legal team had been located exclusively out of Frankfurt’, Pazos says, ‘my involvement in the company has opened up the legal team for the first time to some of the challenges of globalisation, including working around the time differences and finding spaces to bond as a team and share ideas despite the physical distance’. Supporting the company in an early stage of its development, Pazos is a key component of its expansion plans in Latin America and contributes immensely to the successful closure of transactions, with her ‘flavour’ of the market and understanding the extent to which international practice is not applicable to Latin America. Formerly while working at Bancolombia as an in-house legal counsel, Pazos was involved in all stages of transactions, even from the initial client prospection and commercial contacts. She has successfully represented Bancolombia in a complex $250m syndicated loan transaction which involved the coordination of more than a dozen facility documents governed by five different jurisdictions. ‘Given the depth of the market in Colombia, this was one of the larger transactions that particular year’, Pazos points out, ‘it was the first time that the client, a multinational company which originated in Colombia, decided to trust a Colombian player to arrange and lead the syndicate of banks to refinance its entire debt and the team as a whole was able to deliver’. Pazos, also previously worked as an associate at Cárdenas & Cárdenas Abogados and as coordinator of the graduate programme in international law at Universidad de los Andes.