A corporate lawyer of repute, Ahiram Sarai Barbosa Celis has a track record of providing excellent legal and business advice in a number of roles. She currently ‘reviews all contracts in the company, checks the lawsuits, controls the corporate documents and the insurances’ as the sole in-house lawyer at Pantos Logistics Mexico, a global total logistics company. In the process of creating a legal department from scratch, Barbosa has the mind set to ‘create processes of control to avoid risk in the company’ and promotes the idea that ‘areas in the company [should] use the legal department before a problem, as a way of avoiding issues at the company’.

In doing so, she used her past in-house experience to mould and form the new department with this in mind. Barbosa previously worked at LG Electronics México for three years, where she oversaw improvements in internal processes including ‘the adoption of an automated system’ to ‘organise loan documents, contracts and [the] implementation of the legal service system’. Barbosa states that this ‘led to a major increase in the efficiency of the team’s work’ whilst at the same time she has ‘spearheaded the adoption of master contracts, which has gone some way to mitigating the risks inherent in contract work’.