Team Size: 25 people

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

In fulfilling the institution’s core responsibilities, we maintain a strong focus on compliance with applicable legislation, while continuously assessing best practices and procedural improvements through a risk assessment programme that enables us to take a comprehensive approach to risk management.

Our objective is to develop, transform and implement enhanced preventative and corrective measures to detect, reduce and address fraud, evasion and avoidance within the Dominican social security system. We also pursue the appropriate legal action against those involved, with the aim of recovering financial resources and safeguarding the financial stability of the system.

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

In highly volatile environments, the legal team’s role extends beyond managing legal risk to building strategic resilience. Proactivity is essential to ensuring the organisation’s continuity and stability. Rather than waiting for a crisis to materialise, we maintain continuous regulatory monitoring, enabling us to anticipate potential risks and challenges and develop legal action and contingency plans before they have a critical impact on operations.

We also assess our commitments to stakeholders and regulatory bodies, keeping them informed and negotiating any necessary changes relating to timelines, costs or compliance requirements.

Throughout this process, we maintain clear internal communication with senior leadership and the board, while safeguarding good corporate governance practices. The role of the General Counsel is to facilitate solutions rather than create obstacles, while protecting the institution’s reputation and ensuring that decisions made during emergencies remain aligned with regulatory requirements and the organisation’s mission, vision and values.

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

To me, being strategic means going beyond simply explaining what the law says and understanding how the law can support the institution’s long-term objectives. Ultimately, legal strategy is about transforming compliance into a competitive advantage and a pillar of sustainability.

What strategies do you employ to ensure the successful digital transformation of the legal department while maintaining compliance with your country’s data protection laws?

As part of our digital transformation, we have focused for some time on identifying high-volume processes requiring relatively little analytical input, allowing us to free up the legal team’s time through automation and digitalisation.

However, this automation is supported by clear data governance policies, including strict access controls, need-to-know permissions and workflows designed to prevent the unauthorised disclosure or inappropriate processing of sensitive data.

The human factor remains one of the most critical aspects of cybersecurity and privacy. The institution therefore provides ongoing training to ensure that employees handle digital information ethically and securely. Technology should accelerate efficiency, but never at the expense of the legal security of the organisation’s core operations or its users.

Have you had an experience during your legal career that stands out as particularly unique or interesting?

One of the most distinctive and rewarding challenges of my career has been leading the legal and inter-institutional strategy to combat social security fraud networks.

This experience challenged the traditional boundaries of the in-house lawyer’s role, requiring us to move beyond our comfort zone and into complex investigations and strategic litigation in collaboration with judicial authorities.

Designing co-operation mechanisms, structuring technical evidence and pursuing financial crimes that directly affect public funds and the welfare of thousands of people required an unprecedented level of legal, criminal and operational sophistication within our institution.

Seeing an internal legal strategy become a tool for systemic justice, while simultaneously achieving international compliance and anti-bribery certifications for the organisation, has been one of the most challenging milestones of my career. It demonstrated to me that the true value of a General Counsel lies in their ability to generate a tangible and ethical impact on society.