Our History

In the nineties, the magnitude, quantity, and speed with which businesses were conducted increased significantly worldwide. Guatemala was not an exception: the end of the Cold War on a global level, the end of internal armed conflicts nationally, and the emerging globalization and internationalization in the provision of goods and services brought foreign investment, privatizations, significant mergers and acquisitions, as well as growth in the banking and construction sectors.

This dynamic growth presented a unique opportunity for law firms that took advantage of it; some traditional family-owned firms that had previously dominated the market gradually evolved towards a more institutional firm model; and some groups of specialists who formed within those family firms separated and associated to found their own new institutional firms. These two types of institutional firms are the ones that dominate the Guatemalan legal services market today.

LEGALSA, an institutional law firm specializing in Business Law, was founded in the year 2000, near the end of this wave of economic growth globally. LEGALSA entered the Guatemalan legal market to fill an important unsatisfied need in this new world of business: In the race to close deals on mergers and acquisitions, contracts and public procurement, real estate developments, and international transactions and financing, most corporate advisers from leading firms were not ready to provide continuous support when things didn't go as expected; when faced with conflicts between companies or even internal conflicts within a company, their reaction was often slow, disorganized, impersonal, and without leadership. Corporate advisers frequently delegated conflicts to their litigation teams, who lacked knowledge of and training in corporate matters, or subcontracted lawyers, typically from solo practitioner firms, specialized in conflict resolution but lacking previous knowledge of clients or their business.

For many clients, this response was not what they desired. When their rights, assets, or even freedom were at stake, it was then that clients wanted and needed to know that they could count on their lawyer as an unwavering ally.

That is our essence, the DNA of LEGALSA. We emerged as a aggressive, dynamic, and highly specialized team of business attorneys, fully committed to defending the rights, assets, and freedoms of our clients, whether individuals or corporations, through an agile strategic approach and high intensity, both at negotiating tables and in courts and forums of any matter. At LEGALSA, we ensure that our conflict specialists know our clients and understand their business, and our regulatory and transactional counsel know how to handle contentious relationships.

Our personal attention, human warmth, and technical capacity, combined with an impeccable record of results, positioned us at the forefront of the market as the only specialized business law firm in conflict resolution of all kinds.

Over time, LEGALSA has grown and evolved to become much more than just a boutique law firm focused on conflict resolution. Today, LEGALSA is a full-service firm capable of covering all the legal needs of our clients. We have become a leader in Corporate and Commercial Law, having participated in some of the most important mergers and acquisitions in recent years; in Public Law, advising suppliers and concessionaires in several of the largest cases of public procurement in the history of Guatemala; in Real Estate Law, highly specialized; in Intellectual Property Contentious and Non-Contentious; in Wealth Planning and Foreign Direct Investment.

Throughout these 24 years, we have grown, learned, and matured, successfully expanding into virtually all practices typical of a business law firm and enriching our team with new minds and visions. However, above all, we never forgot our history, our essence, our DNA, and that is why we continue to be and will always be for our clients their unwavering ally, always by their side.