Moving people
Founder of Sagardoy Legal & Expat and a key figure in Sagardoy Abogados’ mobility ecosystem, Ana Garicano, her journey, her view of leadership and the current challenges of corporate immigration
by ilaria iaquinta
If you ask her to explain who she is, Ana Garicano—founder of Sagardoy Legal & Expat—doesn’t start with her job title, but with a short list: “woman, professional, entrepreneur, trustworthy”. That is her self-portrait. And she quickly adds the driving force that runs through her entire career: challenges. In fact, it sounds like a habit in someone who has built a specialist practice in international mobility “without hurry, but without pause”, and with passion. Perhaps the key lies in taking enjoyment even when it’s time to push hard.
Garicano steers clear of the romantic notion of vocation. In her case, the path is better explained as a combination of opportunities, decisions taken on the fly and, above all, a constant preference for law that is rooted in people’s real lives. “I always saw myself much more with people than with companies”, she sums up. And that sentence helps explain why she ended up working in immigration and, later, international mobility.
The starting point has both a date and a name. In 2000, she finishes her Law degree at the Complutense University of Madrid, she is 24, and she begins working at her father’s firm—he is an “old-school” lawyer, a trusted family solicitor—doing civil and criminal work. And then Dilania appears, a former Dominican domestic worker from her home who asks her for help obtaining Spanish nationality.
That assignment—almost a household matter—becomes a lever. “She started introducing me to lots of her friends… and I began building a portfolio of private clients with that profile, which worked brilliantly by word of mouth”, she says. From some of those early cases, she recalls, the real impact of the work stayed with her: she remembers the first family reunification she had approved, when she secured visas so that a domestic worker’s children could come to Spain. “I remember how that woman cried”, she says.
Then came SMEs—many in construction—and later businesspeople and investors from Argentina, pushed abroad by the crisis. Her trajectory broadened without losing its origins: people who move for work and who try to bring their loved ones with them.
And if Dilania was the first springboard for take-off, the second was Íñigo Sagardoy, now chairman of Sagardoy Abogados. Garicano met him at a time when the big firms barely offered immigration services: “there was a tiny little team at Price and not much else”, she recalls.
…
