In “Surviving the Legal Market’s Most Dangerous Trap,” Mariano Batalla surveys law firm leaders across Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru to better understand their strategies in an uncertain atmosphere. “The biggest threat to firms isn’t obvious outside pressures like new competitors, price wars, or artificial intelligence,” he writes. “The real danger comes from within—a failure to define a clear firm identity and address three internal blind spots.” Outlining three distinct identity patterns, Batalla says that deciding who you are in the market is what will ultimately help as you navigate the waters and seek to master the market. “Many firms will face a pivot-or-perish moment. Successful change requires strong leadership, cultural shifts, and strategic investments,” he writes. Batalla’s article sets the context for thinking about how lawyers and legal institutions in Latin America transform to survive.
Law firms are, of course, only part of the story and one component of Latin America’s evolving corporate legal environment. How is the changing market impacting law schools? What does that look like in the in-house counsel role?
In “Reimagining Legal Education,” we look at how legal education is changing in Chile and Colombia, as well as speak to judicial training in Costa Rica. Documenting a transformative curricular redesign at the law school at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, we speak to Dean Eleonora Lozano, asking what motivated the change to a curriculum designed around experiential learning. “Ultimately, we believe legal education must move beyond the traditional lecture format,” she says. “It must prepare students to think critically, act ethically, and engage meaningfully with the complex legal challenges of the 21st century.”
In “In-House Counsel Adapt and Advise,” we talk to two in-house counsel at different international companies seated in Mexico, each with directives over Latin America. Each has seen the in-house counsel role transform across their career. In particular, Arturo Ishbak Gonzalez, senior corporate counsel at the LEGO Group, says that he had a crisis moment emerging from his LLM. He was set to return to Grupo Bimbo, the largest bakery company in the world, when he saw changes afoot in the in-house counsel role. The head of their legal department brought everyone together and announced they would dissolve the boundaries between litigation, intellectual property, contracts, and so on. Everyone was to work together. Gonzalez had spent years honing a specialization in intellectual property, but to move forward, he would have to adapt. “It was a wake-up call: I have to modernize my practice,” he says.
To conclude the issue, we speak to Ignacio Abella, the head of research for Latin Lawyer, about what he sees for the Latin American legal market moving forward. As countries down south face economic headwinds from uncertainty up north, Abella says Latin American law firms know how to navigate volatility. “Latin American law firms are resilient because they are accustomed to facing or weathering periods of instability. They’ve seen political upheavals, economic crises, and natural disasters unfortunately,” he says. He continues:
I remember many years ago, lawyers had to tune in to the televised speeches of former President Chávez, because he would change economic policy live. Fast-forward 20 years, we all do that, but on Twitter or through social media and from the U.S. government. But, again, this is nothing new for Latin American law firms. The economic complexity is different and, as I said, is coming more from the north than from within Latin America. But it remains a fact that firms are extremely resilient. They are prepared, and they’re getting prepared to hire more lawyers in areas like disputes, restructuring, insolvency.
