About

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured, highlighting key individuals and their role within the department?

Legal manager, Maricel Álvarez Chavarría, is a key leader since he is responsible not only for the legal area but also for the corporate affairs area. He develops and directs the company’s legal and corporate affairs strategy in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. He is able to understand and interpret with multiple business views on environmental, regulatory, political, social and economic changes in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. He leads the team in ensuring its execution through planning processes, prevention, advice and defence of organisational interests reducing the risk of exposure at legal and media level.

Álvaro Membreño and José Fallas, are the first point of contact in each area. They focus on facilitating compliance with the company’s legal policies and current laws, addressing active legal issues and promoting the prevention of legal problems that generate risks and contingencies to the operation.

What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has been involved with in the last two years?

In Nicaragua, the legal area provided support in one of the most relevant projects of recent years, on the expansion of capacities of the Managua production plant. In Costa Rica, invaluable support has been made in the transformation of the new service models to our clients. This initiative has been spearheaded with respect to the remaining operations in which FEMSA is present.

What recent political, economic or regulatory changes in Central America have impacted your company and the team the most?

In both countries, tax reforms have been an extremely relevant and variable in terms of the impact generated on the equipment and the company. The foregoing, without neglecting the relevance of the political issues that have arisen in Nicaragua and that have undoubtedly challenged us to reinvent ourselves in order to continue satisfying the needs of our clients and consumers.

What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how does the team intend to assist with this?

The main focus of FEMSA today is the obsessive focus on the customer and consumer. Therefore, our team seeks to provide full support to the commercial areas in innovative and transformational initiatives that allow the fulfilment of this important objective. As a service area, we strive to accompany and streamline processes, being part of these initiatives from their conception.

The speed at which the team can respond is fundamental in the process of market growth, since the world is increasingly volatile, complex and uncertain, so initiatives must adapt to the needs of consumers quickly, being functional and reducing contingencies.

How has the team harnessed technology to improve output or drive efficiencies?

Technology has been a fundamental part of our management. Therefore, we have designed several softwares that have allowed us to provide a more efficient service to our clients and in turn ensure compliance with organisational policies. An example of this is the contract and immigration software. Currently, we are developing a Legal APP that allows to keep internal clients informed and informed in real time, with which we intend to shorten the response times. Also, in Costa Rica we work on the integration of the digital signature as part of our processes.

Focus on… adapting to the commercial environment

For many years, there has been a marked tendency of legal services to be extremely formal, accurate, and inflexible. This is not at all negative, since the traditional purpose of legal services is to generate value in terms of the way forward for business and legal acts to be carried out in the correct way that the legislation allows, or to achieve a victory in litigation and more recently in arbitration. On the other hand, every day that passes the world becomes more volatile, complex, competitive and uncertain. For this reason, it is that legal services as a support service increasingly have to adapt to the new reality of the world in which we live. This is extremely relevant, for law firms and in-house legal departments, which have failed to take this step and adapt to global trends, not only in Costa Rica but worldwide. Likewise, the adaptation should not only be in terms of legal advice services as such, but also in terms of teamwork and productivity. It is necessary to update the legal services to the technology, which allows lawyers to speed up processes and improve performance, and can also reduce the use of paper and the tedious procedures of which nobody wants to be part. Part of the services that a lawyer must provide in-house, is to feel part of the company, feel a strategic partner of the company, to the point that when referring to the company we talk about ‘we’, this allows making decisions with the mentality of owner, looking for the best ways to achieve the objectives without losing sight of the legal criteria by which the service is requested. In the same way, this includes participating in the activities of the company, going out to the market, knowing the business, knowing how the business of the company is carried out and participating in the cultural activities of the company that make all those who work for the company the same team, otherwise, legal services are still a ‘support area.’ Today’s legal services must seek to love the problem and not the solution, understand the need of the internal client to be able to meet it according to their needs and not simply seek the ‘legally correct’ response to what is initially required by the user. Getting ahead of customers’ needs will undoubtedly make them feel part of the same team, improve trust and turn the relationship into a strategic business alliance, rather than purely a service. Finally, there are currently many ways to improve the business of legal services for both internal and external companies. We must start by understanding the world in which we currently live, the environment in which customers operate, understand the market, learn about commercial and financial issues that are attendants of the area in which the service is provided and, above all, adapt to the needs of the client, just as a relevant product is sold, as are legal services.