Member Voices: Magda Kowalczyk

Tell us about stand-out moments from your WLG | exchange.

While I was in Mexico, the country celebrated its Independence Day. Mexicans commonly celebrate it by hosting parties for their family and friends. Wendy and I were incredibly lucky to get an invitation from a colleague from the CDMX office, Christian Parra, to attend a family and friends meeting. Christian invited us to celebrate Mexican independence with his brother, mother, aunt, girlfriend, and some other close friends of the family. We spent the most delightful evening with incredibly open, warm, and welcoming people, and we had the best chance to experience local Mexican culture and taste the home-made food. This was definitely a highlight of the exchange so far!

Another very nice experience was a morning hike to Chipinque with our Monterrey Buddies – Sebastian Salazar and Mauricio Barraza. The views were spectacular! We had an opportunity to talk about our experiences and travels, but also exchange ideas about daily legal work and our approach to creating work-life balance. It was a really refreshing start to the day. 

During the last week of the exchange, we visited the Mexican Congress with Mr. Sergio Chagoya Diaz and Mr. Diego Ostos, Partners at Santamarina y Steta. The visit gave me and Wendy a very valuable insight on how the Mexican legislative functions, as we could witness the work of the members of the Congress and other stakeholders of the legislative process. It was such an extraordinary event to me, and I am grateful to everyone at Santamarina y Steta for making such experiences possible during the exchange.

What’s one striking similarity or difference you’ve noticed between your home and host jurisdiction?

I learned a lot about the daily work of my Mexican colleagues. What stood out so far as a difference was that, in Poland, in particular for contact with the public authorities, we seem to use electronic documents, electronic signatures, and remote ways of authorisation much more widely than in Mexico.

I was also impressed to see the corporate books of Mexican companies (such as the share ledger, minutes books) – they are each kept in separate, elegant books. The blank pages are taken out to print the text of resolutions or updates, and then they are sewn back into the books, each with a neatly assigned page number. This kind of scrupulousness in keeping corporate books is something I would very much like to see more often in Poland!