About

Elizabeth Hincapié based on the strength of the nominations she received, has become an excellent leader and is regarded as a star in the competitive in-house legal world. She has been admitted to the bar in three different jurisdictions (Germany, Spain and Colombia) and has a solid international background.

Her outstanding performance led to her current role as head of legal for Europe, Middle-East and Africa at Harsco Rail Europe – one of the world’s largest companies in the rail maintenance equipment manufacturing and servicing industry. In her position, she has proven to be an essential business player within the company, enabling its growth by solving problems or preventing them from happening instead of blocking progress by focusing on legal concerns. Her legal advice has saved the company critical financial resources so that her peers recognise the commercial impact of her legal work and are very keen on involving legal in the early stages of any new deal or performance issues.

She is particularly proud to be conscious of the different skillsets and talents that her colleagues in other departments have and is using them to increase the company’s legal protection by using a simple language far from legal technicalities when communicating legal issues to non-lawyers.

Elizabeth enjoys being a fully operational in-house counsel with a hands-on attitude, which has proven an excellent learning tool for navigating the daily challenges of long-term and highly complex multimillion projects.

Additionally, she is highly committed to developing the in-house community in Germany. For this, she is the co-chair of the DIS40- the below40 association of the German Arbitration Institute, focusing on shedding some light on the effective needs of the users and giving more visibility to all in-house counsel involved in arbitration as an important path to gain more experience in the field to be able to alternate tasks with law firms and so reducing the legal spend to external counsel. Likewise, she is the co-director of the expert group in international contracts of the BUJ – the German association of in-house counsels, organising different events that allow legal departments to deepen knowledge, exchange implementation ideas, share challenges faced and the possible legal and pragmatic solutions, and to benchmark.