Focus on: being both the CEO and the legal head

I work in capital markets, a highly regulated area of the financial industry. Valo is a licensed trustee (fiduciario), mutual fund manager, and custodian who started operations on November 5th, 2021. This means that your insight as a lawyer is always valuable. It proved particularly useful as Valo has strong capacities in structured finance through its shareholder Banco de Valores, but at the same time needed an understanding of Uruguayan reality.

When you combine that legal and regulatory knowledge with your high-level understanding of the market practice in terms of what is being done, how, and why, you start to get a feeling of where there are specific business opportunities. Detecting needs and looking for ways to solve them. This is just an instinct which is not always right, though it is usually worth exploring. Most of the time, it is about taking certain solutions that have been successful in other jurisdictions and trying to adapt them to the local market.

In terms of being a lawyer and operating a business, it has been a learning curve. There are perks and issues that are not obvious when you start that force you to be in a constant revision of your processes. In our case, operations and back office are key because it is part of your attributes when making a pitch, and you want to be the best you can be. Luckily my predecessor came from operations, and she has been kind enough to be on top of our every move. The team has been nimble in launching our first mutual fund, and we are in the process of fine-tuning our processes for securitizations.

In a broader sense, as some who transitioned from a law firm to a transactional lawyer, I would say that operations are something you do while working on a big deal or court case. Each time you manage an extensive M&A or project finance as a transactional lawyer, you are defining priorities, and the critical path, assessing the expected timeline, making a PERT and reviewing it constantly. So, the tools are there to be applied to a more extensive set of projects; you just need a deeper understanding of the complexities of the industry you are aiming for.