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The main driving force behind the reorganisation of construction and concessions firm Sacyr’s Chile legal team has been the need to adapt the company’s evolving business requirements, both in terms of size and operational model. The company has experienced a significant increase in the number of awarded contracts annually, many of which, according to legal manager Carlos Ochoa Salaber, fall under the complex application of the new Law of Public Works’ Concessions. ‘This almost immediately put Sacyr Chile under the spotlight to test this new regulation before a newly established technical dispute board for concessions,’ Ochoa says. Furthermore, as he explains ‘the state’s impulse to build and operate health infrastructure (hospitals) sustained over several administrations, allowed Sacyr Chile to take advantage of its international experience in this type of contracts’, in turn driving Ochoa to reinforce the department’s expertise with in administrative law by hiring several lawyers with relevant work experience at the National Comptroller’s Office. Indeed, Sacyr Chile’s legal department has grown immensely in recent years, from a ‘rather reactive’ two-person team working in tandem with external counsel, to a sizeable nine-strong operation working across diverse areas of specialty, including infrastructure concessions, hospital facilities, bidding processes and litigation. In addition, to improve contractual work through effective administrative or judicial claims, the team has appointed an attorney to work on-site to work on the most relevant project work, to assist the contract management department in adequately communicating with clients, while also putting on record sufficient evidence and justification to support a more robust claims process once work has been finalised. Ochoa says that this new operational model has ‘allowed the company to exercise increased control on legal matters and to initially contain, and then reduce, the cost of external legal advice through selective and competitive outsourcing processes’. The model has also allowed Ochoa’s team to be integrated as a key component in all decision spheres within the company, changing the traditional perception of legal services as a mere ‘trouble shooter’. In the past two years Sacyr Chile’s legal team has been instrumental in the signature of settlement agreements with the State of Chile with respect to contractual claims derived from the construction of public roads. The team has also successfully participated in numerous bidding processes for the construction of public hospitals. For instance, in 2017, it completed the construction of a new hospital in the city of Antofagasta and has very recently been awarded the construction of the public hospital for the district of Alto Hospicio (city of Iquique), as well as the improvement of El Tepual airport in the city of Puerto Montt. At present the team is heavily involved in supporting key infrastructure projects developed by Sacyr Chile, such as a hospital in in the city of Quillota and Autopista Americo Vespucio Oriente, an urban highway in the heart of Santiago. Besides Ochoa, who has been an architect of the team’s recent transformation, the team employs a number of outstanding lawyers such as Nicolás Cañas Henriquez, Cristobal Marimon Mourgues and Ricardo de Pablo Trevisany.