Disciplined practices, not lofty goals, determine whether major infrastructure bidders succeed or stumble. “Organizations usually don’t rise to the level of their goals, but settle to the level of their practices and people,” says Leo Caffaro.
Currently senior vice president, legal for North America at Acciona’s infrastructure business, Caffaro has built that insight over two decades working on major projects and in private practice. From early days serving a wide range of clients as an associate to steering legal strategy on multibillion-dollar P3 megaprojects, he has watched how behaviour and discipline translate into commercial results.
The first lessons came in private practice at McLennan Ross and Borden Ladner Gervais, where he saw that technical answers were only the start of what clients valued. “The early years of practice were important to understand the effort required to be knowledgeable about a client’s organization and the responsiveness required from legal support to meet business needs,” he says. Exposure to companies that ranged from banking and real estate, to oilfield support services and small businesses built “appreciation and professional humility for what clients were working so hard to achieve in all types of work,” he says, and that still shapes how he expects legal teams and external counsel to support businesses.
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That client-centric mindset framed his move in-house. A secondment to Kiewit, a major infrastructure contractor, turned into a permanent role in Vancouver. It was, as he puts it, “a great way to be introduced to the industry space,” where he discovered he was “genuinely interested in infrastructure delivery,” at a time when opportunities across western Canada were growing.
As project counsel on the $2.5 billion Port Mann/Highway 1 project, he served close to key management on critical decisions. “Being project counsel provided a total immersion into all the activities that it takes to complete a megaproject,” he says, and it exposed him to internal staff and executives, municipal authorities, as well as owner, crown corporation, and vendor representatives, all of whom had to find ways to keep moving when pressures, risks, and disputes mounted.
After a decade at Kiewit, he pivoted to Acciona. What drew him was a chance “to step up into a key legal role in a business that was poised to grow,” just the existing business was about to take on additional engagements across both Canada and United States. With bidding activity and project awards on both sides of the border, his mandate quickly expanded into building a North American legal function that could operate as one team across jurisdictions.
“We continue to grow, and I have added several legal colleagues to the team,” he says. “We get to work with capable Canadian, American, and international colleagues at the corporate and project levels.”
Growth by itself is not the objective; Caffaro is focused on how that growth is achieved. His north star remains the quality of practices and people, particularly on major bids where risk can easily grow for organizations. “Luckily for me, I have high performers on my legal team, and that makes a huge impact,” he says. Those people are central to how Acciona engages with shifting risk profiles in the market, from progressive models in Canada that move away from fixed-price contracts to transportation concessions in the United States that he describes as “proper P3 projects … associated with massive infrastructure investments worth several billion dollars each.”
That cross-border diversification, he says, is “not only great for business reasons,” but “professionally gratifying for my team to have opportunities across the market space.”
Managing that diversification means making hard choices about when to lean on external firms and when to keep matters in-house. “As we grow, we are on a continuing learning curve, especially for US matters where laws, procurement rules, and industry practices can greatly vary from state to state,” he says. Joint ventures with other infrastructure partners often require external counsel “to work within aligned workflows and bring more resources to the efforts of ongoing in-house work.” Where the team already knows the jurisdiction, procurement model, or client, “our in-house team leans in hard to leverage our experience and shape discussions with management and other project stakeholders,” he says.
That leaning-in is central to his model of in-house practice. “We need to recognize that in-house lawyers are at the leading edge of a lot of this work, with a sensitivity about the priorities and pressure points of management, which is something that few external counsel do as effectively and at the kind of pace that we move internally, where time is usually an enemy, not an asset,” he says. Internal counsel, in his view, must also bridge the communication gap, since he has “seen even good external counsel struggle to clearly communicate their advice in a manner that accounts for the particular audience within a corporate environment,” making collaboration essential to plan the work, manage ongoing activities, and present management with consistently strong legal support.
For lawyers aiming at senior strategic in-house roles, Caffaro’s advice is clear. “Whatever your actual role is, step up to increase your scope,” he says. “Help them with issues that you should be aware of.” That means being responsive and getting comfortable providing “actionable work product with less than complete information, because waiting for perfect conditions, for an elegant solution, is not helpful when what is required is simply being effective.”