Legal Sr. Supervisor | Pepsico
Alvaro Castro
Legal Sr. Supervisor | Pepsico
How do you build and maintain strong relationships with key internal stakeholders, especially in high-pressure or fast-moving scenarios?
Trust is built on results, and the best results come from thorough planning. To build trust with my internal stakeholders, I encourage them to invite me to early project planning sessions where legal opinions are not obstacles but enablers for achieving the projects within the legal framework. Participating in these initial meetings also fosters transparency about timelines, helping stakeholders organise their work effectively. Teams appreciate this approach because it gives them a clear and realistic overview, allowing for flexibility and enabling them to align their KPIs with the overall objectives.
What do you consider the biggest challenge for in-house legal teams today, and how are you addressing it within your own team?
The biggest challenge for an in-house lawyer today, in my view, is twofold. Firstly, managing multiple legal matters that require knowledge across diverse fields, gathering essential information from external legal providers, and then translating it into language that internal clients can easily understand. Secondly, handling numerous urgent requests, where the key is to prioritise effectively. The only way to achieve this is through a deep understanding of the business operations, enabling decisions to be made in order of the value they add to the business’s development.
How do you cultivate legal talent internally, and what skills do you see as most essential for the next generation of in-house lawyers?
For the next generation of in-house lawyers, I believe the key skill is the ability to communicate legal concepts across disciplines. On a daily basis, in-house lawyers work with internal clients or stakeholders who, in most cases, are not lawyers and are unfamiliar with legal institutions or terminology. Therefore, it is essential to support better business performance by ensuring that messages or emails are written in simple, easy-to-understand language. Additionally, we must adapt and create presentations, training sessions, and documents that are sufficiently visual to be easily learned and understood by non-lawyers. The days of 60-page reports and text-heavy PowerPoint slides are over. What the business needs are visual and executive elements, and that is the skill to develop and the mindset to cultivate new talent.
