For the last two decades, the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession has been studying the transformative role of the general counsel in the United States and around the world. In a 2012 Wisconsin Law Review article, Center on the Legal Profession faculty director, David B. Wilkins, posed the question: is the in-house counsel movement going global? By that, he meant, is the “heightened public profile”—the power, prestige, and leadership role—of the general counsel in United States companies spreading around the world? In subsequent work, Wilkins and a team of more than 50 researchers from around the world examined exactly that question in India, Brazil, and China.
In this story, we continue our documentation of the in-house counsel role by speaking with two Mexico-based lawyers who work for international companies and have responsibilities and directives covering Latin America; first, Arturo Ishbak Gonzalez, senior corporate counsel for the LEGO Group; and then, Leopoldo Ortega, head of legal for HSBC in Mexico. We talk to them about their careers, how their roles have evolved, and how they navigate uncertainty or times of crisis.
Learning to be a generalist
After graduating with his LLM from the Franklin Pierce School of Law at the University of New Hampshire in 2015, Arturo Ishbak Gonzalez was faced with a challenge: where to take his career next. He trained to be a lawyer in Mexico and originally aspired to work in banking or finance before moving to Uhthoff, one of the country’s premier intellectual property law firms, where he began specializing in IP. From there, he further refined his IP specialty, moving in-house to Grupo Bimbo, the largest bakery company in the world. Returning there after his LLM, he suddenly became aware of an emerging trend: a need for in-house counsel to be more agile, generalist, and flexible.
“At the time, we had a department for IP, a department for litigation, for contract law—but at one point, the general counsel called everyone together and said, ‘I know that we have these specialist areas, but we are going to dissolve everything and everyone will work together,’” Gonzalez says.
Suddenly, Gonzalez, the IP litigator, was asked to work on civil and commercial law litigation too. “At that point, I thought maybe I should leave the company,” he says, “but when I looked around, I learned everyone was moving in that direction.” He says, “It was a wake-up call: I have to modernize my practice.” Relying on his foundational knowledge, he began branching out to make sure he could adapt as the in-house counsel role evolved.
Today, Gonzalez is senior corporate counsel at the LEGO Group, where he is in charge of IP strategy across Latin America. Working at the LEGO Group has allowed him to be creative while protecting a pivotal patent and the larger LEGO universe. As new technologies have emerged, Gonzalez remains nimble and receptive to learning—thinking about how to continue to protect trademarks in the metaverse or as NFTs—relying on what he learned after his LLM.
When times are hard, use it to your benefit.
Arturo Ishbak Gonzalez, senior corporate counsel, the LEGO Group
As one of the LEGO Group’s only IP lawyers based in Latin America, Gonzalez works cross-functionally. Each day, he meets with stakeholders across marketing, sales, and more to understand their goals and how he can support them; outside the company, he regularly meets with authorities and custom officers across Latin America to help them understand how to spot counterfeits. Likewise, he collaborates across the company to align IP strategy globally. His work has also served as a test case for the company; when he realized, for instance, that the LEGO Friends mini-doll and DUPLO figurine did not have a 3D trademark, he used a novel strategy to protect it in Peru. “It worked, and when I obtained the registration in Peru, I started moving all over South America and Mexico,” he says. His counterparts in Asia and Europe began asking him questions, and soon the strategy was replicated across the company.
Gonzalez has learned that passion for the business is key. “Sometimes law firms only think about the legal way to tackle issues,” he says. Reflecting on a class he once took on alternative dispute resolution, he says he always learned to ask—whether in a friendly or adversarial dealing—what the counterparty wants or what would make them happy or comfortable. “When I talk to the business and they say, ‘I’m thinking about launching this marketing campaign,’” he explains, “instead of jumping to ‘How are we going to protect this campaign?’ I ask, ‘What is your main goal?’ Because maybe we can skip all the bureaucracy.”
After learning how to be flexible early in his career, Gonzalez remains calm in the face of challenge or crisis. For instance, he recently presented to the World Intellectual Property Organization on how tariffs might help organizations better identify counterfeits from e-commerce platforms around the world. As geopolitical and economic uncertainty roils much of the business world, Gonzalez says, “When times are hard, use it to your benefit.”
A specialized industry
Before Leopoldo Ortega Carricarte joined HSBC Mexico as head of legal, he worked as a transactional lawyer at law firms based in Mexico and the United States, respectively. He later joined JP Morgan and Credit Suisse as head of legal and compliance for Mexico. The specialization that made him successful early in his career was increasingly challenged as he moved higher up in his in-house career, where he was expected to oversee issues far outside the transactional realm.
“At HSBC, I realized that I had to supervise a portfolio of thousands of litigation matters, both outstanding litigation as well as new matters, on a yearly basis. We’re talking about thousands literally. And therefore, I had to learn in an expedited manner—civil, labor, administrative, and criminal litigation matters,” Ortega explains. It was “overwhelming,” he says, as he juggled the “size and complexity of the portfolio and the need to be up to speed reporting to governance forums, speaking with colleagues and internal stakeholders and sometimes with members of the judiciary.”
Paradoxically, while Ortega found himself needing to broaden his expertise to meet the demands of a generalist role, he notes that the industry itself was and is moving in the opposite direction: “Corporate banking used to be more generalist,” Ortega says, “but today, specialization is key.” As banking and regulatory requirements have become more complex, in-house legal teams are increasingly composed of highly skilled experts providing “specialized legal advice,” who must be “more agile, technologically focused, . . . more efficient, really do more with less, and . . . focus on substantive legal work,” as he puts it.
In this environment, Ortega’s role is to bridge both worlds: drawing on his own breadth to manage a wide-ranging legal team, while building an in-house practice composed of experts equipped to handle an ever-diversifying set of specialized challenges. Over the last twenty-five years as a general counsel in corporate banking, he has seen legal departments expand “sometimes with hundreds or thousands of employees,” meaning much of the work that they used to outsource to law firms is staying in-house, especially as, Ortega says, “technology is and will continue to be an ally for legal departments.” Understanding and managing the expectations of a hub-and-spoke model in a global organization is key. Concise and agile communication with local and global stakeholders and management, and understanding what matters and how to communicate it, is essential, he says.
Embrace agility and stay informed.
Leopoldo Ortega, head of legal, HSBC Mexico
HSBC has been an exciting challenge for Ortega. On a day-to-day basis, he is “actively participating in governance forums, engaging with peers in banking to ensure a consistent approach and discuss best practices and coordinate sophisticated local and cross-border transactions and matters” as well as engaging with internal stakeholders and regulators. But HSBC has a broader purview than his previous banking jobs. Part of a 1,000+ member legal department with 72 professionals locally in Mexico and 12 in Latin America, Ortega is also involved in other branches of the business—asset management, insurance, retail, and more. “The goal of our advice,” he says, “is to help our shareholders and clients find the best solutions.”
Mexico in particular is an important market for HSBC, Ortega says. “Mexico has the largest network of branches of HSBC on a global basis—approximately 800 branches,” he explains. “We have thousands of ATMs as well and over 6 million clients.” This means the “breadth of matters we get to see is quite expansive—regulatory, litigation, transactional work.” What was overwhelming at first has been an important piece of making Ortega’s job interesting. “I like to work in international, sophisticated, and meritocratic corporations in which you can participate in complex transactions or matters with colleagues in a respectful and challenging environment, with a global set of standards and market practices,” he adds.
As a lawyer trained in Mexico and the United States, Ortega says, “On the broader perspective, for me to work in a company that has an international presence and [where] I get to supervise the legal work of other countries, it’s a challenge.” Hiring, training, and retaining a team of highly motivated and sophisticated lawyers and professionals is critical. He explains: “I think a strong team of professionals that you can rely on—as well as common sense—is very relevant because I’m not an expert on the regulations of every single country outside of Mexico. And even in Mexico, I cannot be an expert in every single regulation.”
Initially drawn to law to see how he could make a difference “in society and in the administration of justice,” Ortega says that Mexico’s “sophisticated legal environment reflects the openness of the Mexican economy.” To continue to be competitive in such a market and in volatile times, in-house counsel must “stay technologically informed,” as well “build cross-functional partnerships—proactively collaborate outside of legal, with other law firms, peer financial institutions, associations, etc.” This means, “Embrace agility and stay informed,” he says.
Generalist or specialist?
In this story, we presented two models for in-house counsel, operating in very different industries, who nonetheless prioritize some of the same lessons and skills: collaboration, communication, and cross-functional coordination. Both lawyers were presented with challenges early in their career—having homed in on specific specialties, they were suddenly asked to do more. Albeit overwhelming, both Gonzalez and Ortega realized that the legal foundation and strategic acumen they had gathered through education and years in practice would serve as a valuable springboard even as they tackled new subject areas or different workloads. While Ortega says that corporate banking legal departments are becoming more specialized, his role in leadership means that he must coordinate the breadth and depth of expertise. Likewise, while Gonzalez focused on intellectual property litigation early in his career, he has had to expand his reach—becoming more of a generalist, able to engage with lawyers working across company departments and outside counsel. Overall, what we see are two lawyers working in large international companies, based in Mexico, engaging with jurisdictions across Latin America, all while tackling a changing world and adapting in kind.
