Legal team size: 18

Major legal advisers/ external counsel: Gross Brown, Ferrere, Mersan, Colab, Irun & Villamayor

What are the projects that you are most proud of working on over the past 12 months?

Over the past five years, we have grown from being a leader retail bank in Paraguay to become a conglomerate consisting of five different entities. My team and I have been involved in the purchase of an insurance company and a broker dealer entity, as well as setting up an asset management company. We have diversified our products line (pursuant to a more refined segmentation of clientele´s needs) and sophisticated our team in terms of being able to adequately respond to the growth of our business as a whole. We have eliminated day to day dependencies on external counsel and have created a dynamic with a selective group of external law firms that resulted in more efficiency, better quality service and more dedicated personnel. In addition, we have set up under my leadership a dedicated compliance team that has the governance of all regulatory framework applied to all entities of our conglomerate as well as of our code of corporate ethics. We have grown from a group of four lawyers to an actual team of 18 people in the legal and compliance department. Being part of a multinational group, we have been able to establish a regional cooperation with our peers in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Colombia that permitted us to exchange best practices and learn from different legal experiences that we currently apply in our day to day solutions.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world, specific to Paraguay, that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

Consumer behaviour has been changing rapidly. This leads to an enhanced need of adherence to international business practices. In-house lawyers should be increasingly mindful of data protection rules as well as regulatory standards of transparency. In addition, disruption has been the tone of business trends and in-house lawyers should be proactive in terms of responding to clients´ needs and expectations as far as designing products that are according to clients´needs and enabling efficient channels of communication internally and externally.

What are some key attributes every in-house lawyer should possess?

Persistence, hard work, inspirational leadership, empathy and adaptability.