Meet the officer

Nicole Phillis interviews Eduardo C Botello Adame

Eduardo C Botello Adame is the Managing Partner of Santos Elizondo, a full-service firm based in Monterrey, Mexico. He joined the firm in 2005, became a partner in 2016 and has led it since 2023. Nicole Phillis, the North American Regional Forum’s Publications Officer, sat down with him for a conversation about running a law firm, why the IBA is worth the flights and what he does when he is not doing any of that.

You have been at Santos Elizondo for two decades. What has kept you at the same firm for so long?

Honestly, because it kept changing. I joined in 2005 as an intern, went to New York for my LLM at NYU and spent a year as a foreign associate at Cleary Gottlieb. Then, I came back to a firm that was small enough that you could still shape it. That is a rare thing. In a lot of places, you inherit a machine, and your job is to not break it. Here, every few years the firm asked something different of me: first, to become a good transactional lawyer, then to build a practice and head a business development committee, then to lead the whole thing.

The work itself has been a big part of it too. Corporate, M&A, financings, energy, cross-border deals. It is a practice that never lets you get comfortable, especially in Mexico, where the regulatory foundation moves under you regularly. Twenty-one years in, I still learn something almost every week that I didn’t know the week before.

You have been Managing Partner for four years now. What has that been like?

It has been the hardest and most rewarding thing I have done professionally. When I took over, we were a small firm on a path to growth. Today, we are more than 120 people, we have opened an office in Mexico City, we have created several new practice areas and we have grown our revenue several times over. Those are the numbers people ask about and they are real, but they are not the interesting part. The interesting part is what growth does to a firm. At 30 or 40 people, culture is something that happens on its own. Everybody knows everybody, the standard is set by osmosis. At a 120 people, across two cities, it stops being automatic. You have to actually build it, name it, defend it.

The other lesson, which I learnt more slowly, is that being Managing Partner is not about being the best lawyer in the room. It is about making sure the best lawyer on that matter is in that room and then getting out of the way. That is a genuinely uncomfortable adjustment for someone who believed that doing the work yourself was the only way to do the job.

How do you keep a culture intact during that kind of growth?

By treating it as work, not as a value on a wall. One thing we have done and plan to continue doing, that I am proud of, is a town hall with the whole firm — everyone, not just partners — structured in facilitated rounds so people actually talk instead of listening to me. You hear things there you would never hear in a partners’ meeting.

Beyond that, I think culture in a law firm comes down to two very unglamorous things: who you hire and what you tolerate. Everything else is decoration. If you bring in people who are generous with their time and you are consistent about what is not acceptable, it is easier to preserve. And you have to accept that growth means giving up some of the intimacy of a small firm. What you can protect is the sense that this is a place where a young lawyer gets real responsibility early, because that is what happened to me, and it’s the reason I stayed.

You are very active within the IBA. What do you get out of it?

More than I expected when I started. The obvious answer is business and that is true: the IBA has brought real work through our doors and referral relationships that have lasted years. But if that were the only return, I don’t think I would have been involved for this long.

What I actually value is the quality of the room. You sit in a session or on a panel with lawyers from a dozen jurisdictions who are extremely good at what they do, and you get an honest, unvarnished view of how a problem is being handled somewhere else. That insight is very hard to get any other way. Publications and webinars give you the polished version; a conversation over coffee with someone who just closed a deal gives you the real version. I have taken ideas from those conversations and used them to inform how we advise clients in Mexico.

And there is a professional friendship dimension that I didn’t anticipate. Practicing law can be isolating at the top of a firm. There are conversations you cannot have with partners in your own firm. Some of the people who have been most useful to me on the hardest calls of the last four years are lawyers I met through the IBA and who have no stake in my firm at all. That is worth a lot of trips and flights.

What kind of work still gets you out of bed?

Negotiations and solving actual problems for long-time clients. I think of negotiation as a discipline in its own right, not a soft skill you pick up along the way, and I enjoy it the way other people enjoy chess. The deals I remember are not the largest ones; they are the ones where the parties were genuinely far apart, and we found a structure nobody had on the table when we walked in.

I also enjoy board work, I sit as board member or secretary for a number of Mexican companies, because it is the opposite of deal work in tempo. A deal is a sprint with an ending. Governance is a long relationship where you are useful precisely because you have been in the room for years and remember why a decision was made years ago. Both keep me honest in different ways.

And when you are not doing any of this?

Family, first. My wife and I have four children, and that occupies more logistics than the firm does on most weekends. We also spent several years building a weekend house outside Monterrey, in Santiago, Nuevo León, on a piece of land with a small stream and several hundred oak trees. We call it La Bellota, the acorn, partly for the oaks, partly because it happens to contain most of the letters in our surname. It was built slowly, when we could afford it, which turned out to be the right way to do it.

Travel is the other thing I enjoy doing. My family really enjoys ski resorts, both in summer and winter. I am not a good skier, so I enjoy the resorts more during the summer. Two years ago, my wife and I went on a cycling trip through Burgundy on e-bikes, which I recommend to anyone who wants to enjoy the scenery, wine and touring amazing towns without the need to be an athlete. We are doing it again next May, this time cycling through Sicily’s wine country.