Conference programme

This session analyses how technology is reshaping Latin American business beyond AI’s headlines — fintech, digital platforms and adoption across sectors — alongside the regulatory, data and liability questions raised by the fastest-moving part of that story: AI.

This session follows where energy capital is actually going in Latin America: continued investment in oil and gas alongside the renewables and grid build-out competing for the same capital and permitting bandwidth. Regulatory frameworks, financing conditions and how operators and investors are weighing traditional and transition energy against each other.

China’s expanding footprint in Latin America, alongside Gulf sovereign wealth funds and family offices that have accelerated into the region only in the last three years, is opening a genuinely new capital corridor into energy, agribusiness, fintech and critical infrastructure. This panel looks at deal practice, screening and approval regimes, joint venture and governance expectations and the cultural dimension of these transactions set against Canada’s much longer-established role as one of the region’s most consistent institutional investors, particularly in mining and infrastructure.

This panel takes stock of commercial and investor-state arbitration, cross-border litigation and enforcement across the region. Latin America is experiencing a genuine rise in investor-state claims, increasingly rooted in resource nationalism in the energy and mining sectors, with tribunals paying closer attention to constitutional court decisions, indigenous consultation requirements and other domestically-driven state action. Third party funding, historically concentrated in the US, UK and Australia, is now arriving in the region, meanwhile an uneven enforcement landscape — some jurisdictions are considerably more arbitration-friendly than others — remains a live practical problem for counsel structuring dispute resolution clauses.

This session looks at AI adoption in legal practice alongside alternative pricing, firm economics and talent expectations and retention, and asks what these forces mean for how Latin American firms are actually managed.

This session analyses the role of lawyers, in-house and external, in strengthening access to justice, democratic institutions and the rule of law — including compliance and anti-corruption work, rarely framed as a public good in its own right but central to institutional integrity — and asks how firms and legal teams sustain effective programmes.

General counsel from across the region will discuss what they now expect from external counsel, how in-house teams are absorbing AI and the cost pressure and regulatory complexity reshaping the general counsel’s job today.