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The inclusion of Walmart Chile’s legal department in this year’s GC Powerlist comes off the back of its participation in two significant corporate transactions completed in the last two years. The first deal involved the sale of Walmart Chile’s shopping mall business called Espacio Urbano (EU) for an approximate sum of $660m in 2016. As the biggest real estate transaction in Chile to date, the deal required Walmart’s legal team, according to legal and corporate manager Carmen Roman, to transfer ‘more than one thousand leases contracts of commercial spaces and commercial stores, including department stores with national and international presence’. The second deal took place in December 2017 and involved the sale of several financial services companies owned by Walmart, including the issuer of the well-known credit card Líder Mastercard. ‘This operation involved the signing of the SPA, commercial agreement, and more than 50 annexes and contracts to regulate the relationship we will have with financial services in the future,’ says Roman. ‘We’re still working on this project, preparing the transfer of the companies, which will subsequently have to be approved by the corresponding authorities (antitrust authority and banking market authority)’. Its capacity to support such complex corporate transactions, and the team’s ability to innovate internally is not to be underestimated. In fact, the team recently appointed a specially designated innovation and technology lawyer to assist the department’s efforts in this field, which have most recently resulted in the replacement of the department’s old contract management system and the implementation of digital signing for documents. To add to this, the team has now fully embraced digital tools in its operation, actively using apps such as SOS legal and Facebook’s Workplace. For the last 10 years the department has also run an open ‘super conference’, where the team invites influential speaker to talk about such diverse topics as trust, the circular economy, share value, innovation and many other important legal matters. The team is comprised of 12 lawyers and eight support staff and is led by Alejandro Berríos – senior legal manager for real estate, anti-trust, acts and contracts and corporate; and María Jose Maldonado – senior legal manager in the management of operations, financial services, litigation, outsourcing and projects.