We’re sharing LexLatin’s interview with our partner Rodrigo Albagli, in which he shares his perspective on the evolution of the legal industry based on the journey of az over its 35 years.
Rodrigo Albagli never wanted to be a lawyer—or, more precisely, he wanted to be an entrepreneur—and he used the law as a platform to build something in that direction. When he founded, together with Gabriel Zaliasnik, one of Chile’s most renowned firms in 1991, he had no degree, no clients, and no instruction manual; instead, he had something harder to come by: the ability to see the legal industry for what it truly is (an industry, a business, for-profit organizations) when almost no one in Chile was willing to admit it.
Thirty-five years later, Albagli built a firm with business units, KPIs, a commercial strategy, and a corporate culture in an environment where talking about client acquisition costs or profitability per matter was, for a long time, considered provocative. He did so by traveling, observing, adapting what he saw in the world’s top firms to the Chilean reality, and betting on areas and models that took years to bear fruit but accurately anticipated where the market was headed.
Today, at the most uncertain and fast-paced moment the profession has ever experienced, Albagli continues to do the same: look ahead. In this conversation, he speaks of artificial intelligence without hype and without fear, of succession without nostalgia, of innovation without grandiloquence, and of the challenges that, in his view, will define which firms survive and which do not in the coming years. A conversation that goes beyond the usual language of lawyers. And that, precisely, is the idea.
LexLatin: How would you describe az’s differentiation in your own words?
Rodrigo Albagli: To answer that, we have to go back to the beginning. Gabriel and I were two law students at the University of Chile, children of Jewish immigrants, with a rather commercial DNA. Both of our fathers came from the textile industry: in my case, a fabric retail chain; in the case of Gabriel Zaliasnik, his father held the Lee brand license in Chile. Everything we heard from the moment we were born had to do with business, retail, and customer service. With that mindset, in our final year of college we decided we wanted to start our own venture rather than work for others.
We launched in 1991 with no idea what it took to build a firm, but with the basic conviction that we had to go out into the streets to find clients. From day one, Gabriel said he was going to be a criminal defense attorney. I, on the other hand, said I didn’t want to be a briefcase-carrying lawyer my whole life: I wanted to build a legal services firm. That initial tension between two very different visions—the corporate world and complex criminal litigation—which in the 1990s were practically incompatible, was nevertheless the origin of az’s DNA.
Since we had nothing to lose, we took the plunge. And what initially caused conflict eventually generated, over time,an added value that traditional corporate firms lacked: a strong in-house criminal litigation practice, rather than outsourcing that work to external criminal defense attorneys. Until the other firms realized that was where the big opportunity lay.
What was the firm’s growth and diversification process like in those early years?
It was entirely organic. I got into intellectual property completely by chance: my family asked me to register some trademarks, and after a year, I realized how much I had paid the vendor for a relatively simple job. I decided to do it myself. There was a significant technological barrier at the time: there was no trademark monitoring software; it had to be developed. But a provider emerged who had created the software for Chile’s INAPI, and once their exclusivity period expired, I signed my first licensing agreement with them. From there, I dedicated myself to growing in that area.
Today we are ranked Band 1 by Chambers in intellectual property, with a team of fifteen people that accounts for fifteen percent of the firm’s revenue.
At the same time, I began traveling regularly to international conferences, but not just to stay in convention centers. My goal was to visit firms, meet with partners, and understand how they ran their businesses. I would stay two, three, or five days in each city and visit ten, fifteen, or twenty firms. I wanted to see how they filed documents, how they organized their processes, and how they handled marketing. And I would return to Chile to try to implement what I had seen.
We were the first firm in Chile to hold events in art galleries, for example. A friend who owned one of the most important galleries lent me the space; I brought in three hundred influential people who could become his clients, and I transformed the place with music and production. For me, innovation isn’t about who incorporates artificial intelligence today. An innovator is someone who does things differently when others don’t dare to.
And at what point did growth begin to demand a more professional structure?
In 2004, I felt the poncho was getting too big for me. We had grown inorganically, creating business units based on the opportunities I identified, but with little governance and without adequate support in finance, administration, or marketing. That’s when I came across Matrix Consulting, a consulting firm just starting up in Chile, founded by engineers who had attended MIT, Harvard, and firms like McKinsey.
Since they were just starting out, we reached an agreement that fit my budget, and we worked together for a year to overhaul the career development, governance structure, and overall professionalization of the organization. It was an excitingly tortuous process that brought me to tears. Today, looking back, it was clearly the pivotal year. What we discussed with Matrix remains the benchmark on our timeline.
That meant strengthening the management and finance roles, building a strategic marketing team, and creating the space to bring in new partners. Up until that point, Gabriel and I were the only ones. Two or three years into that process, we opened the property, created the concept of equity and non-equity partners, and began bringing others on board. Today, Gabriel and I still control eighty percent, but there are five or six other partners with equity stakes and several non-equity partners who are moving forward. Last year, we revised the partnership agreement with succession in mind.
Between 2004 and 2025, how did the management model evolve?
We moved away from intuition and toward planning. We created KPIs, systematically developed business units, identified senior staff with the skills and ambition to lead new areas, and put them in charge. Themodel is that of an internal factory: we incubate areas we see as having potential; for one or two years, we do not measure them against pure results so as not to destroy them prematurely; we set objectives and metrics for them; and when they reach certain revenue standards and a minimum headcount of three or four people, we grant them independence. Today we have ten business units operating under this logic, and we can continue to generate new ones using the same model.
I also identified early on certain trends that would transform the industry. One was the judicialization of commercial relationships: with greater regulation, stricter oversight, and harsher penalties, companies were going to become more litigious, which favored a firm like ours with a strong litigation practice.
Another was the development of in-house legal departments. In 2004, I wrote an essay anticipating that in-house legal teams would grow in size and in practice areas. In Chile, they weren’t even called General Counsel: they were called “fiscales,” a term that in the Chilean context evokes someone who oversees rather than manages. At first, I saw this as a threat, because much of the commodity work that law firms did began to be handled internally. But over time, I turned it into an opportunity: the development of in-house legal departments democratized access to companies. Large companies stopped working exclusively with the historic firms linked to traditional families. Any firm with the capabilities and financial strength to prove it could reach any client.
Over the past five to seven years, one of my main focuses has been communicating directly with Heads of Legal and Heads of Compliance, using a specific structure designed to reach out to them.
And now, with 35 years of legal practice under your belt, what are your thoughts on such an unpredictable and volatile future?
We are in a very challenging moment where several factors are converging at the same time. The first is succession. When you’re 59 years old and you founded your firm, talking about succession creates a natural resistance. But last year we decided it was time to build the institutional foundations, to put in writing and prove that the firm exists beyond its founders. For me, that comes first, before any conversation about technology or business models.
The second is understanding that building a brand is very difficult, and sustaining it is too. We have built a brand that transcends individual people, one that has positioned itself as a trustworthy firm. That has a value that no technology can replace on its own. I could incorporate all the artificial intelligence in the world, but if I don’t have a trustworthy brand behind it, it doesn’t matter.
You mention succession and institutionalization as priorities. How does that translate into concrete decisions for the coming years?
One of my central goals between now and 2026 and 2027 is to transform all the good things we’ve managed to develop into something systematic. Business development at AZ has so far been more intuitive than structured, more embodied in people than in systems. That has to change. All the processes I’m evaluating moving forward—in human resources, business development, prospecting, and legal work itself—need to be formalized and supported by technology.
To that end, six months ago we created a technology committee with the support of an expert external consultant. The committee has two levels: an executive level, with that consultant as the liaison, and an operational level, made up of one young lawyer from each business unit, aged between 27 and 33, who raised their hand saying they’re interested in or good at technology. We’re testing tools with them. And I say “tools” in the plural because the compliance department may need a specific vertical solution to build risk matrices, while the tax department may need a different one. We’re not looking for a single tool to do everything.
Right now we’re in negotiations with Harvey and Legora, talking to partner firms in other countries that have already implemented them, and evaluating options. I don’t want to do something just to look good in a LinkedIn photo. For the past six months, I’ve been working with Magnar, which allows me to gain efficiency while I determine which will be the main AI tool. That should be finalized during the first half of this year. And in addition to the technology front, on March 2, a professional human resources manager joined the firm, coming from another firm in the Chilean circle. Until now, I didn’t have a human resources department as such. That’s changing too.
On what other fronts are you innovating right now?
At the beginning of this year, I finalized something I’d been thinking about for a long time: the spin-off of the intellectual property division. The trademark division was foundational to az, but having it within a large structure—riddled with unnecessary costs and operating under a logic that doesn’t align with the trademark business—was limiting my growth. I got the project approved by the board, created a new company, rented an office three blocks from here, and the team of fifteen people, led by partner Eugenio Gormáz, set up shop with its own structure.
What I find truly innovative in this case isn’t just the spin-off itself, but that I placed a commercial director from the legal software world on equal footing with the legal partner. A lawyer and a legal products sales expert managing together on the same level. The goal is to triple the division’s revenue in three or four years, with an almost exclusive focus on domestic and international brands, where the distribution is roughly eighty to twenty.
A recently published article noted that Latin American firms are only now investing more in Business Development. How do you view that from your experience?
I find it inconceivable that this would be headline news in 2026. In any other type of company, it would be unthinkable for investment in business development and marketing to be a novelty. These are key areas of any organization’s operations. But in our industry, we continue to operate under a logic of individual heroism: the rainmaker who works alone and does not transfer their knowledge or relationships to any system. That model is not sustainable. What I’ve been trying to build for years is exactly the opposite: moving from heroism to systems. That eighty percent of the firm operates with business logic, with KPIs, with replicable processes. The other twenty percent, like the highly complex criminal practice area led by Gabriel, has its own rules, and we must respect them. If you try to apply the same logic to that twenty percent as to the rest, you end up stifling creativity and losing the people who sustain it. But that is the only area where I accept the exception.
Speaking of the future: how do you see the impact of artificial intelligence on the training of young lawyers? Some say that AI doing the work of junior associates will radically change the base of the pyramid.
It’s an issue that genuinely concerns me. In the past, a young lawyer would join a firm, spend ten or fifteen years working under a mentor, and from there develop the judgment that would later become their greatest asset. That training process is under threat. If machines do the associate’s work, how will a criminal lawyer acquire Gabriel’s judgment and experience in another twenty years?
I don’t have a definitive answer, but I am clear that this is where the real challenge for human resources departments lies. It’s not just about managing bonuses and performance reviews. It’s about anticipating the type of profile we’ll need and designing how to develop it in a completely different environment.
On a day-to-day basis, most firms, including the big ones in New York, generally continue to operate as they did fifteen years ago. We talk a lot about transformation, but in practice, real change in organizations hasn’t arrived yet; there are many bottlenecks. What technology specialist Ethan Mollick calls “the jagged frontier”: we know more about what we want and less about how to implement what we want. What factors do you think will drive those changes?
In law firms, changes will come thanks to pressure from legal departments—their primary clients. They are the ones with the budget, the ones adopting technological tools, and the ones who will start asking firms how they are using AI. They will demand concrete demonstrations of efficiency and will impose standards for data governance and privacy. The change won’t come from within the firms. It will come from the clients. And firms that don’t adapt will be left behind. We are intermediaries, not an end product. Either we integrate into the system properly or we end up being eliminated.
To wrap up: what surprises you most about what you’ve built over these 35 years?
That I never planned it that way. I followed my convictions, I stayed consistent, and one day I realized that what I had built was a brand that transcends individual people. That, to me, is worth more than any technological innovation. I can incorporate all the artificial intelligence in the world, but if I don’t have a trustworthy brand behind it, it doesn’t matter.
Building that trust took 35 years. Destroying it can take much less. That’s why the focus now is on protecting it, systematizing it, and ensuring it survives its founders.
