Team size: 32 (Peru: 7)

What are the key projects that you have been involved in over the past twelve months?

In 2025, our legal function in Latin America concentrated on four pillars: people, operational discipline, technology adoption, and proximity to the business. We invested in our team through targeted upskilling in data literacy, contract strategy, and cross-border employment risk, while formalising development plans and mentorship to strengthen succession and retention. We tightened budget governance by introducing quarterly matter reviews, clearer success metrics for external counsel, and a greater use of alternative fee arrangements aligned with value delivered. On technology, we launched a legal intake, service-level expectations, and data for continuous improvement; we also piloted responsible AI tools within Legal for first-pass contract review, knowledge retrieval, and document summarisation, coupled with human-in-the-loop controls and a clear use policy. We mapped and automated several high-volume workflows—such as NDAs and low-risk service agreements—using templates, playbooks, and approval matrices to reduce cycle times and free our lawyers to focus on strategic work. All of this was anchored in a “business-first” operating model: embedding lawyers with key business units, joining commercial pipeline reviews early, and prioritizing prevention over remediation. We are now preparing to implement a Contract Lifecycle Management platform in 2026 to unify templates, clause libraries, negotiation playbooks, approvals, and post-signature obligations tracking across the region.

Are there any particular challenges for which in-house counsel should be preparing in 2026?

Legal teams in Latin America, and specially in Peru, should anticipate a more complex regulatory environment, particularly around data protection enforcement, AI governance, labor and social security reforms affecting business and work models. Election cycles will amplify regulatory, contracting and compliance risks, requiring robust scenario planning and protections. Finally, the pressure to evidence measurable impact—speed, cost, and risk outcomes—will intensify, making legal operations capabilities and reliable data indispensable.

How do you manage legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis, ensuring that your legal strategy aligns with the broader business?

We align our legal strategy to the business by anchoring crisis responses in a pre-agreed governance framework. Before a crisis, we define roles, decision rights, and thresholds for escalation, run tabletop exercises, and maintain playbooks for data incidents, labor disruptions, and reputational events. When instability arises, we operate a lean incident command structure led by the business, with legal driving regulatory mapping, privilege protocols, stakeholder communications, and contract levers. We translate legal risk into commercial terms—cash, continuity, customer impact—so companies can make timely, informed trade-offs. Afterward, we conduct a structured post‑mortem to capture lessons learned, adjust policies and contract standards, and update training so the organisation emerges more resiliently.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

Modern in-house counsel must combine legal excellence with business fluency. The most critical attributes are judgment under uncertainty, the ability to translate risk into business outcomes, data literacy to leverage metrics and technology, and stakeholder empathy to build trust across functions. Equally important are curiosity and a prevention mindset—designing processes and contracts that avoid problems rather than celebrating firefighting.