About

Legal manager Alvaro Andres Ponce Reyes leads the exceptionally talented in-house legal team at DIRECTV Colombia which is made up of five lawyers that ensure the legal compliance of all the business’s initiatives. The team also aims to accomplish the company’s KPIs, as well as acting as the judicial representative of the company before public, judicial and private entities. The team includes Marina Luz Ortega Moreno, legal chief, who handles litigation, customer service and data protection; attorney Lina Maria Quintero Bohorquez who supports contracts, digital, risk management and corporate law among other topics; Fabian Felipe Castillo Patiño, legal chief, handling compliance and contract management and defines the legal strategy of the launching of new businesses; and finally Pablo Andres Mejia Benjumea, legal chief responsible for labour and public law matters. Recently, the team adapted to the acquisition of DIRECTV by the AT&T group, which saw the team diversify its role and become more business-oriented. According to Ponce Reyes, the team ‘[had] to learn and be trained in different topics such as project management, new budget priorities, a new corporate culture and new legal goals, in order to give a qualified support to the company’. Additionally, the team supported the launch of DIRECTV GO, an OTT video platform. The legal team had to reinvent itself and look for new sources of knowledge, since no specific regulation regarding these matters in Colombia exists. Ponce Reyes identifies that, ‘this led us to consulting other countries’ experiences and understanding the functioning of these platforms in other markets in order to give informed support that mitigates risks in different company areas such as regulatory, taxes, customer care, content negotiation with programmers, among others’. The outcome of this situation is a global proactive team that has made possible the successful launch of DIRECTV GO in Colombia and Chile in December 2018, and Argentina and Brazil in June 2019. In terms of litigations in the public domain, ANTV initiated an administrative investigation in which it claimed that DIRECTV Colombia had a pending payment of around US$700,000 and additionally had the intention to apply the breach of contract clause in the license contract, making DIRECTV pay 20% of the total price of the license contract, around US$8m. According to Reyes, ‘our legal team created a solid defence strategy, achieving the end of this investigation, protecting our company from paying the amounts claimed’.