Legal Tech On Tour Miami: Technology Transformation in Latin America

On July 23rd 2026, I had the opportunity to join the ILTA’s Legal Tech On Tour Miami, after being invited by my friend and fellow Microsoft MVP Melissa Ballesteros.

If you are not familiar with ILTA, the International Legal Technology Association, it is a global professional association focused on education, knowledge sharing, and community across the legal technology industry. You can learn more about ILTA and its community on their website.

The panel was part of ILTA On Tour, which brings conversations around legal technology, innovation, and the challenges facing the industry to different regions and local communities.

Our conversation in Miami focused on what technology transformation actually looks like across Latin America, and more importantly, why organizations need to stop treating the region as a single market.

We talked about organizational maturity, culture, regulation, language, adoption, governance, and AI, along with the challenge of taking strategies designed at global headquarters and making them work in very different local environments.

A few themes kept coming back throughout the discussion:

Translation is not localization.
Standardize the guardrails, but localize adoption.
Organizational maturity matters more than company size or budget.
Silence is not adoption, and attendance is not engagement.
AI scales both the quality and the problems already present in an organization.
Local teams should help design the strategy, not simply deliver one created somewhere else.

One of the parts I appreciated most about the discussion was being able to approach it from my own perspective. I grew up, studied, and started my career in Brazil, but most of my adult professional career has been in the United States. That gives me an interesting view into the gap between how U.S.-based organizations often design technology, governance, and change programs and how those decisions may actually be experienced locally.

We also spent time talking about AI and the additional complexity it introduces across jurisdictions, languages, and cultures. AI does not magically clean up an organization’s information environment. If permissions are excessive, content is outdated, ownership is unclear, or terminology differs between markets, AI can surface those problems much faster and to a much larger audience.

The same principle applies to adoption. A global organization may need consistent security, governance, accountability, and technical standards, but that does not mean every market should receive the same training, communications, rollout approach, or support model.

The goal should not be to make every market operate identically. It should be to create enough consistency to govern responsibly while leaving enough flexibility for people to successfully adopt the technology in their own environment.

Thanks again to Melissa Ballesteros for inviting me to be part of the conversation, to Deeanna Fleener for hosting the panel, to Barbara Gondim Rocha for sharing the conversation with us, and to everyone who joined us in Miami.