On August 31 was held the Webinar on the Decalogue of an in-house lawyer by Mr. Juan Manuel Vaquer, who is currently president of DuPont for Latin America. Juan has turned his 30-year experience as an internal legal advisor to a multinational in this Decalogue and detailed the characteristics that an external legal adviser should have, according to the following details:

1. Technical Knowledge: know your subject matter.
2. Knowledge of the client and his business: know in detail everything related to the business of the client, know he earns money.
3. Proactivity: inform proactively everything that the client may be interested in without waiting for an appointment.
4. Availability/Technology: family-work balance, be willing without being a slave and use technological tools well for the benefit of the client and be available as possible, within certain logical parameters. Avoid customer abuse.
5. Decision/Innovation: decision making is a key moment for business managers, and the lawyer can play a key role. Help make decisions and avoid saying that there is a 50% chance. Helping to gauge the risks, it is not enough to know them but to help calibrate their magnitude. Logical fears about possible professional liability, this is mitigated by generating a relationship of trust between lawyer and client. Innovation in legal strategies to be successful. Lawyer can help the client innovate.
6. Communication: be clear and not too technical so your client can easily understand an opinion. Communicate proactively about status and progress of issues, this is always related to issues of litigation. If there are no news, just report this.
7. Pragmatism/Collaboration: lawyer has to privilege the interests of the client over their professional achievements. Customer needs a better business solution, which may not be the best decision from the legal point of view. Need to work in multidisciplinary teams. Collaboration between internal and external counsel, avoiding jealousies that result in the prejudice of the final client (business).
8. Efficiency/Competitive cost: be efficient in the legal service provided, avoid overlapping costs or jobs, not allocate more resources than are necessary. The lawyer has to be remunerated in a fair and equitable way, not to give away the work. Use modern management tools, maximize predictability of costs and times.
9. Common sense/balance: lawyers generally have a broad view of things and can bring common sense in decision making. Lawyer does not have to be afraid to exercise this role with his client, not to remain locked in the role of merely legal adviser.
10. Ethics: Integrity. It is increasingly tolerated not to comply with ethical standards; companies that do not comply, fail. Technology helps detect misconduct in certain behaviors. For the profession of a lawyer, ethics and integrity are especially important because of the very nature of the legal counseling service. The lawyer represents the company and for that reason ethics is key.

This Webinar was attended by 59 people.

To access the recording you can visit: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/recording/6297151966976067587