|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Sitting inside TelevisaUnivision’s Newsport facility, surrounded by the buzz of the newsroom with dozens of monitors, set lights, and cameras, Lara Bueso Bach often contemplates how different life can be on the other side of the same profession.
Before joining TelevisaUnivision in June 2022, Bach had spent her entire legal career working for a global law firm, where she focused her practice on high-stakes commercial litigation across various industries. Although she had invested considerable time and energy in climbing the big law corporate ladder, she found that she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take a hard left turn into the world of in-house legal work at TelevisaUnivision, joining Executive Vice President and General Counsel Pilar Ramos.
“I had been advocating for years and years for greater diversity in the legal profession, where Hispanics comprise less than 5 percent of the profession. And then, serendipitously, I met Pilar through a mutual friend, the Miami Dolphins’ general counsel, and she was singing the same tune,” Bach explains. “I jumped at the opportunity to join not only her but also TelevisaUnivision, which represented a chance for me to work for mi gente, my people. Overnight, I went from the only Hispanic woman in the room to one of many.”
Bach came on board at the company—a global leader in Spanish-language media—as senior vice president of litigation. Her role has since expanded to encompass labor and employment and immigration matters as well. Amid navigating the move in-house, she has continued to look to Ramos for inspiration, as a legal leader and steadfast supporter of diverse talent. Bach draws, too, on the values she learned during her upbringing in Miami, the Hispanic-majority city that she and her family still call home.
“Everybody has this sense of orgullo, this pride, to be working here and to be taking the company to the next level.”
Lara Bueso Bach
She grew up with a passion for the law—a career choice her parents were quick to endorse. “My mom is Cuban, and my dad is from Honduras. Like most immigrant parents, they always had a desire for me to do better than they did. That meant I could be a lawyer or a doctor,” Bach says with a laugh. “Thankfully, I actually liked the law.”
Her parents instilled in her three basic tenets—education, service, and gratitude—that now guide her approach to everything from leading a team to parenting her two daughters. “The most important gift you can ever give your child is an education,” she elaborates. “They know school will always come first, but we also take the time to regularly practice gratitude, recognizing that none of us have excelled on our own, but rather, with the support of the proverbial village along the way. And we teach to give back to our community in any way possible—from charitable contributions to beach cleanups and pro bono efforts.”
Bach credits her parents’ tenets with motivating her pro bono work throughout her decade-plus tenure at the international law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. While there, she assisted dozens of survivors of human trafficking in expunging their criminal records. “The assignments were very difficult emotionally but incredibly rewarding,” she says. “Each case gave the survivor a fresh start to seek employment, higher education, or even basic housing that their records had previously prevented them from achieving.”
In addition to her pro bono practice, Bach advocates on behalf of women lawyers as the former president of the Miami-Dade chapter of the Florida Association for Women Lawyers, where she founded their non-profit scholarship program that has funded over $100,000 in law school scholarships.
Her arrival at TelevisaUnivision happened to coincide with the major merger between Mexico-based Televisa and US-based Univision. “It was a great opportunity to reset and launch our new streaming platform ViX,” she says. “Everybody has this sense of orgullo, this pride, to be working here for our Hispanic audience and to be taking the company to the next level.”
Bach has fully embraced that sense of pride over the past year, which has seen her adjusting from representing multiple clients in private practice to focusing all her energy on a single client in-house. “I had practiced complex commercial litigation for twelve years before I came over here but never in the media industry, where everything moves more quickly, at the same pace of breaking news.”
“As in-house counsel, we are in positions to enable us to ensure that business is being distributed to diverse talent across the legal industry.”
Lara Bueso Bach
She plans to take a page out of Ramos’s playbook by ensuring that her team has the necessary financial support to pursue career development and leadership opportunities. Beyond that, she is eager to leverage her power as an in-house attorney to hire outside teams that reflect the incredible diversity of TelevisaUnivision itself.
“As in-house counsel, we are in positions that enable us to ensure that business is being distributed to diverse talent across the legal industry, which I consider critical to empowering our community and the next generation of diverse leaders,” she says.
As she continues to serve others and to grow her own leadership skills moving forward, Bach will combine daily doses of gratitude with heartfelt pride in what TelevisaUnivision is achieving.
“This company, every day, is executing on a vision to conceive, create and deliver world-class content to a diverse global audience,” Bach says. “I want to make sure that I’m supporting their business objectives while balancing and mitigating risk—and ensuring that, whatever we’re doing, we’re doing it with integrity.”
