Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP announced on Tuesday that Alexandra Guajardo, a veteran legal operations professional, has joined the law firm as its first global director of commercial strategy. Guajardo, who most recently worked closely with international law departments at Shell PLC, began her new role on Monday and now leads BCLP teams responsible for pricing, project management, and client analytics. In addition to her previous in-house experience at Shell, Guajardo held senior practice roles at law firms for approximately two decades. As Shell's pricing and analytics officer since 2017, Guajardo oversaw the company's outside counsel and worked with all legal departments worldwide to negotiate alternative fee arrangements and fine-tune business processes. She was also responsible for managing Shell's preferred panel of firms. Throughout her career, Guajardo spent most of her time at Fulbright & Jaworski LLP, now part of Norton Rose Fulbright, where she was the lead business process analyst in charge of designing workflow processes for large-scale projects since 1997. In a statement, Guajardo said that she was excited to return to the law firm side and use her experience in developing successful relationships and outcomes with clients.
According to her LinkedIn profile, after almost 13 years, Guajardo became a business analyst at an undisclosed firm. She led the practice management team through multiple development phases of a financial statistics dashboard. From 2012 to 2015, she served as the lead applications engineer at what is now Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, managing a multimillion-dollar software maintenance budget and renegotiating IT software contracts with vendors and consultants. Guajardo then moved to Baker Botts LLP in 2015 as a practice support manager and a pricing and project management team member. In the Tuesday announcement, Guajardo expressed her eagerness to learn from BCLP's teams and apply her knowledge from the client side. Further comments from her were not immediately available.
