Michelle Browdy is Senior Vice President, Legal and Regulatory Affairs and General Counsel at IBM. She is responsible for IBM`s global legal, security, corporate governance and compliance activities and policies, as well as IBM`s environmental, government and regulatory functions. Previously, Woodcock worked as an accountant at Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers before embarking on a legal career. He used his accounting training at the SEC, where Woodcock chaired the agency`s National Task Force on Financial Reporting and Auditing. Prior to joining the SEC in 2011, Woodcock spent a decade in the commercial litigation group of Vinson & Elkins. Edward Sebold was appointed Kyndryl`s first general counsel. He is expected to assume the role of general counsel once IBM`s spin-off is completed in late 2021. Sebold will be based at the company`s future headquarters in New York. Jones Day partner David Woodcock, who served as general counsel for the law firm`s Dallas office, left the firm in July to join Exxon Mobil Corp. in Irving, Texas, as assistant general counsel.

GC sits down with Alejandra Castro, Head of Law, Patents and Compliance for Central America, Caribbean and Andes, and Catalina Morales, Head of Data Protection for Central America and the Caribbean, to learn about technological changes within pharmaceutical giant Bayer`s legal team. An in-house IBM attorney will lead the legal department of the company`s new spin-off, called Kyndryl, an independent company created to host IBM`s managed infrastructure business. Alejandro Fernández R-B, General Counsel at Cotemar, talks about his efforts to introduce technology to his legal team, the challenges of selling the value of legal technology investments to the company, and the ethical considerations of adopting new technologies. Woodcock joins an in-house legal team led by Ebner, who has been with Exxon since 1980. Ebner assumed the role of the Company`s General Counsel in late 2016, following the retirement of his predecessor S. Jack Balagia Jr. The way lawyers use technology has evolved over the last few years, and I think we have made progress, but there is still a long way to go. When I joined IBM eight years ago, you were able to provide quality service to your internal customers by knowing the company and the products.

Now everything is moving faster: regulations have changed, so the only way to get new regulations is to use technology – especially if you work in the fintech environment. As in any industry, there is always room for improvement, and the only way to do that is to create a culture of continuous learning, including technical and soft skills in your learning journey. Dean has been a partner at Fried Frank since late 2017, when she entered the areas of cybersecurity and white-collar crime, regulatory enforcement and corporate investigations. A decade before joining Fried Frank, Dean began his legal career as a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York. Browdy took over as legal director of the firm in 2015 following the retirement of former General Counsel Robert Weber. As in many other countries in the region and the world, Colombia begins its journey in the use of technology in various professions. Integrating AI into in-house legal departments, for example, helps law firms focus on what`s really important – their clients – while technology ensures documents are processed faster and more accurately, resulting in better services for clients and time savings for lawyers. LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law are external online distributors of ALM`s extensive collection of current and archived versions of legal news publications. LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law clients may access and use ALM content, including content from the National Law Journal, The American Lawyer, Legaltech News, New York Law Journal and Corporate Counsel, as well as other sources of legal information. Two large law firms approached two firms internally with regulatory, litigation and compliance requirements. Urrego Hernández describes how Diageo Colombia is developing its legal expertise in IT and shares his thoughts on why lawyers in Latin America need to open their minds – and culture – to embrace technological change. Emerging technologies are real, and we have to live with them.

Technology is not there to replace the work of a lawyer, but to improve it. There is a human factor that lawyers provide – interpretations, judgments, decisions, solutions and knowledge of legal systems and a particular business situation – which must be part of the overall legal system – which is why technology and human knowledge complement each other. On the other hand, if a lawyer keeps up with various technological changes and adopts new technologies, the practice of the legal profession is improved. In fact, I believe you will become a better professional. Previously, Michelle served as Secretary of IBM`s Board of Directors from 2012 to 2014. Prior to that, she spent five years as IBM`s Global Head of Litigation, overseeing intellectual property, antitrust/competition, employment, class actions, securities, and commercial litigation globally. Prior to joining IBM, Michelle was a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP, where she negotiated a variety of complex cases in the United States. Iberian Lawyer had the pleasure of collaborating with VdA and IBM for the event “Cybersecurity Risks & Strategies”. The objective of this initiative is to provide technical training to legal services in Portugal on the important topic of cybersecurity.