GC Sidebar: Augusto Aragone, General Counsel at Ingram Micro

In this GC Sidebar Season 2 episode, Paragon Legal CEO Trista Engel speaks with Augusto Aragone, General Counsel at Ingram Micro, about building high-performing legal teams, embracing risk as a business partner, and bringing the right technology and talent together to deliver legal value.

Augusto shares why he believes legal is a team sport: you’re only as strong as your team, and the best legal functions are built by hiring people you trust, empowering them to lead, and removing obstacles so they can add value to the business. He reflects on why risk is inherent in everything a company does, and why legal’s role is to frame it, mitigate it, and help the business weigh the trade-offs rather than avoid it.

He also discusses how his team is approaching AI and legal technology, from choosing the right tools to rethinking processes and data quality, and how a well-scoped engagement with flexible legal talent can bring specialized expertise to the team without the overhead of big law. Augusto also looks back at the career-defining call that moved him into global M&A, and why taking risks is essential to growth.

Full episode now available.

Read the Full Conversation

Prefer reading over watching? Below is the complete transcript from our GC Sidebar interview with Augusto Aragone, General Counsel at Ingram Micro.

Trista Engel: Welcome to GC Sidebar, a short and sharp conversation series with leading general counsels about the decisions, the reflections, and the people behind the title.

I’m Trista Engel, CEO of Paragon Legal, and today I’m joined by Augusto Aragone, General Counsel at Ingram Micro, a Fortune 100 global technology distributor that sits at the center of the IT supply chain. Augusto has built a global, multicultural career and brings that lens to his role as General Counsel at Ingram Micro, from leading the company through its 2024 IPO to staying closely engaged in building an inclusive culture. Augusto, thank you so much for being here with me today.

Augusto Aragone: The pleasure is all mine, Trista. Thank you for having me.

Trista Engel: Let’s dive in! What’s one thing you’re most focused on for 2026, and why?

Augusto Aragone: That’s a good question. The key objective is to integrate technology and human resources, our lawyers and our teams, and find the right balance in what we use technology for. It’s about rethinking the way we shape and deliver legal value to the company. With AI-powered tools, we’re looking at contract drafting, contract review, legal spend analytics, and a whole host of other tools out there. It’s about finding the right tools for us, because not all of them are a good fit. We have to be selective, and it’s very easy to get distracted by these technology implementations and lose sight of the end game.

So it’s about finding the right technology for our teams to be more effective and add more value to the company, and that also entails rethinking some of our processes. Some people add technology on top of pre-existing processes, and that doesn’t necessarily give you the value you want.

The other huge challenge, in addition to change management, is that the quality of the process is mostly driven by the quality and hygiene of your data. And all of us are hoarders. We’re not very good at cleaning our garage. So, combining all of that, and with the help of the team, we’re trying to figure out the right balance and the right tools that will give us the most value for our investment.

Trista Engel: That’s fantastic. There’s so much pressure on legal departments right now to implement technology and AI, but like you said, you’ve got to do it smartly. You figure out what the end goal is and what problem you want to solve before you start, and then you adapt your processes to the new structure and the new end goal. I think that’s a step a lot of legal teams implementing legal tech skip over: what do we need to change in order to make this successful?

Augusto Aragone: Yeah, you’re spot on. There are so many companies offering so many different things that it’s a little overwhelming to figure out which ones you want to partner with. We typically partner with those that have the potential to still exist down the road, so we look for a modicum of financial backing. But more importantly, we look for those that iterate with us, because the products may be shelf-ready, but seldom do they apply to the reality of the business. It’s that iteration, that collaboration, that partnership that typically leads us to work with some vendors and not others.

Trista Engel: That’s great advice for anybody looking at legal tech, or any kind of tech, because those two things are not always going to be true.

Augusto Aragone: Indeed.

Trista Engel: What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned as a GC?

Augusto Aragone: I don’t know if I learned this lesson as a GC, or perhaps a bit earlier, but you are as good and as strong as your team. So surround yourself with smart, talented folks who have your back. This is a team sport. We are under tremendous pressure and have so many objectives to achieve, and if you try to micromanage or control things too much, you limit the potential of the team, the function, and the value you bring to the company.

We’ve been very discriminating in recruiting people who are the right fit, because we want doers. We want people who can operate with a level of supervision, not fact-checking or going back to a command-and-control type of structure. We need people embedded in the business who can partner with business leaders, who can be creative, who can take risks, and who can also have a tough conversation and speak truth to power. It’s a difficult profile to find, but I’m very fortunate that we’ve been able to form a very solid team over the years that adds tremendous value to the company, and it’s recognized as such.

Trista Engel: That’s fantastic. I think that’s a great call-out. When you’re an individual contributor, or just one person, as we all are, there’s only so much you can do. When you hire fabulous people, you become a force multiplier, and they become force multipliers too. The amount you can accomplish, and the success of those accomplishments, just increases exponentially.

Augusto Aragone: Totally. You want to set them up for success, remove obstacles, and have their back, because at some point they will ruffle feathers, and that’s expected. If you’re not ruffling some feathers, perhaps you’re not pushing hard enough.

Trista Engel: I like that. Don’t play it too safe.

Augusto Aragone: That’s exactly right. Taking risks is part of it. We’re here to advance the business. The business is about making money and providing value to our customers, and that comes with a modicum of risk. When there is no risk, there’s probably no value, and we’re probably dead at that point. Risk is inherent in everything we do. It’s how we frame it, how we mitigate it, how we put it in a risk-reward scenario and determine what the odds are. In a way, and I know some people don’t like this, we’re risk managers.

Trista Engel: Well said. What’s one career moment that changed your trajectory?

Augusto Aragone: Probably when I moved to California. I was with Ingram Micro, and I was the head of legal for Latin America at the time. The GC called me and said there was an opening for a position in corporate. I asked what the position was about, and he said it was to do global M&A, securities, and corporate finance. I said, “Well, I think I maybe know something about one of those areas, but not the other two.” And he said, “You’ll figure it out, and we’ll support you so that you learn it.”

The lesson there is that this was a five-minute conversation, followed by a probably lengthier conversation with my wife, and then another five-minute conversation with my boss, asking me, “Okay, when are you going to move?” So the lesson for me is that you’ve got to take risks with your career. I see some people trying to play too safe, going back to the point we were making before about the business. To grow in our careers, we need to take risks. Things are not going to be guaranteed. There will be unknowns and uncertainties, but you’ll figure them out and navigate them. Part of the evolution of all of us in our careers is about taking risks.

Trista Engel: I love that, and there’s a great through-line for you. Many attorneys in this profession regard risk with a negative connotation, but you’re flipping the script and looking at risk as a positive: what can you learn from it, what can you get from it. And it applies, like you said, to both the business and your career.

Augusto Aragone: Totally. And look, risk is the reason we exist. If there were no risk, we wouldn’t have a job. So we’ve got to embrace it and welcome it. It’s tough, I get it. It’s not our nature. We’re hardwired to avoid, transfer, mitigate, and eliminate risk, to take it out of the picture. There are obviously some categories of risk I don’t want to have anything to do with, but in general, uncertainty is inherent in a business setting. We have a lot to bring to the table to support the business, and when it comes to our own growth, the way to grow is to take risks.

Trista Engel: Absolutely. How have you leveraged flexible legal talent as a way to augment your in-house team?

Augusto Aragone: My first experience was probably 15 years ago, when we needed to retain a securities and corporate governance subject matter expert to help us for a couple of quarters with SEC filings, the 1934 Act periodic filings. Over the years, we’ve done it several times in different areas, and I think the sector has evolved so much. The bench that companies like yours have is so good. These are fantastic professionals, some of them senior counsel and partners from Big Law, and they bring enormous value if you have a well-defined scope.

Where these engagements flounder a little, in my opinion, is when the scope is fuzzy and people want to throw a body at an issue that isn’t well defined. If you need a securities lawyer for a couple of quarters, or you have a data privacy event and need data privacy experts to help with the response, or you want to overhaul your employee handbook and bring in an employment attorney to help, when the scope is well-defined, partnering with alternative legal service providers works very well. The value’s there. Minus the overhead of Big Law, it’s incredibly powerful. But I’ve seen experiences where it doesn’t work as well, and it’s when people think you can throw bodies at a problem without guidance or instruction.

Trista Engel: Yeah, I completely agree, and I’ll pull out two things from what you said. One is that it gives you access to specialized expertise that you may not need full-time in-house at this time, or maybe ever. You also don’t need to go to a law firm, but you do need a really qualified professional to take on the work.

The second is that you hit the nail on the head in saying that the legal professionals at a place like Paragon are extremely highly qualified and extremely talented, and they’re choosing to practice in a different way. That can be one of the biggest hesitations for companies, and sometimes for attorneys, in terms of the types of work they’ll be doing. But the quality of the professionals is extremely high, and they can really hit the ground running. I appreciate you pointing that out, because it’s not something everybody understands if they haven’t tried it before.

Augusto Aragone: Yeah, I’ve had great experiences, and I’ve met very qualified professionals who have added value from the get-go.

Trista Engel: I love to hear that. When you’re not lawyering, where are you most likely to be found?

Augusto Aragone: Probably hiking, traveling, watching series with my wife, or sitting on the couch with the dog, just relaxing and chilling. Our jobs are so intense that the way to unwind for me is nature, maybe a beach, maybe a hike, some outdoor activity, or just reading a nice book and sipping a cup of coffee.

Trista Engel: Yeah, sometimes it can be hard to allow yourself to slow down like that, but the important thing is just doing what relaxes you, what brings you back down to Earth.

Augusto Aragone: Exactly.

Trista Engel: And the bonus question: Paragon turns 20 this year. What’s one memory from 20 years ago that still stands out to you?

Augusto Aragone: Happy anniversary, and thank you very much. The memory that stands out to me is that in 2006, I was probably studying for the bar. I’m originally an attorney who graduated from law school in my home country of Uruguay, then went to study in Italy, then came to the U.S. and took an LLM at the University of Miami, and then sat for the New York bar. So I was probably deep into bar prep, one of those wonderful moments that at the time felt horrific, but with the benefit of 20 years, we tend to idealize and dramatize a little. But I was probably deep into bar study sessions.

Trista Engel: Yeah, that’s a great point. Twenty years on, the things that felt so hard maybe don’t feel so hard anymore, and sometimes the idea of getting to sit in a library and study a book about something actually sounds quite nice these days.

Augusto Aragone: Yes, that’s right.

Trista Engel: Well, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us today, Augusto. It’s been a pleasure to have you.

Augusto Aragone: My pleasure. Thank you, Trista.

Trista Engel: Alright, that’s a wrap on today’s episode of GC Sidebar. Catch more great conversations on our website at paragonlegal.com. Thanks for tuning in!