Diego Llavero Rivera serves as the general counsel and corporate compliance manager for SGS, a Swiss multinational company that is the world’s leading inspection, verification, testing and certification firm with more than 90,000 employees and over 2,000 offices and laboratories.

Throughout his career at SGS, he has had to deal with very different challenges, however he specifically highlights the process of utilising a more business-centric approach that allows him to provide both invaluable legal and corporate advice to the company. ‘The deployment of best practice policies such as compliance, social corporate responsibility [and] operational integrity really helped strengthen the most important values of our company’ he says.

Llavero takes pride in being considered a business partner by the whole organisation, something he deems as one of his proudest achievements: ‘At the end, it all is about the entire organisation considering the business lawyer as a true “business partner”, the company lawyer should be considered by the whole organisation as someone to trust, not only there to prevent or minimise risks, but, additionally, should be considered as someone to trust so the whole organisation achieves its goals’ he adds. In addition to his in-house career, Llavero is an associate professor of various Master’s courses in public and private universities and is a regular lecturer at national and international conferences.