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Our department is structured under three areas that report to Walmart Central America’s general counsel, supporting more than 38,729 associates, 813 stores, nine distribution centers and 18 agribusiness plants.
Claudia Gonzalez has been the general counsel since August 2016 and leads the corporate security team in the five markets which accounts for approximately 90 associates. Gonzalez was born in Chile and has more than 15 years of experience between law firms, retail business and financial services industries.
Emersson Orozco is the assistant general counsel in charge of corporate and real estate for Central America. He was born in Costa Rica and he joined Walmart in 2010, where he has grown from closing legal manager, to licenses and permits manager, to assistant director on the compliance department in charge of the licenses and permits program to his current position in legal. Along with José Vega, regional legal manager, they lead all corporate and antitrust matters for the company.
Laura Granera is our regional legal manager for the agribusiness and logistics for Central America. She was born in Costa Rica and joined Walmart in 2015 after more than 18 years in private practice and has amassed vast experience in corporate law, M&A and intellectual property law. Along with her team, she oversees all legal matters with a true conviction and practice of being a business partner.
Jennifer Gonzalez is our assistant of general counsel for operations and litigation for Central America. She joined Walmart in 2009 as legal country manager of Honduras, having the responsibility of managing all the legal issues related to the company’s operations. In 2016 she was promoted to current position and was transferred to the regional offices located in San Jose, Costa Rica. In her current role she leads and organises the legal operations team in the five countries of Central America. Three legal managers report to Jennifer Gonzalez: Alejandra Bogantes is the legal manager for Costa Rica and El Salvador, Augusta Fernandez is the legal manager for Nicaragua and Honduras and Gloria Rodriguez is the legal manager for Guatemala.
In the last two years the team has been involved in the company growth plan, supporting the opening in 2019 of 34 new stores for Central America with a total investment of approximately US$135m. It has also assisted the company with opening of a new Distribution Centre in Mateare, Nicaragua and a new agribusiness plant in Coris, Costa Rica, openings that had a total investment of over US$105m.
On the other hand, our department has been a promoter for Walmart Central America to become the preferred retail for our vendors, launching the Good Business Practice Code which includes a mediation office to better serve our retail and agribusiness vendors to solve conflicts based on important principles such as good faith and impartiality.
In addition, the team contributes actively with the Walmart share value proposal, supporting female empowerment in the region through free legal training for women (more than 1,214) that want to become entrepreneurs. We have trained more than 400 small and medium size companies to help them with their business and the sustainable growth.
We are able to serve clients of all socio-economic levels, allowing them to obtain all the advantages of a formal retailer with the compromise of offering low prices every day through all our formats widely distributed within our countries. Our clients can have peace of mind that in everything that we offer we ensure quality, safety, a legitimate origin, and social and environmental responsibility. In all this, our legal team is deeply involved from the purchase of a property, to opening a new store – the team assures the safety and quality of everything we sell, and importantly, in the role of formalisation and the well-being of our associates.
Our team culture consists of being a high-performance team that ensures business success based on strategical, creative and practical legal solutions, without comprising our integrity and core values. We are always ready to take any new challenge and propose new things, learning as fast as possible from our mistakes and trying again. The communication and alignment of our objectives and the company’s strategy is key in our culture to achieve our goals, to facilitate and focus on which direction we should strive.
Our profession is constantly changing, and the in-house lawyers are no exception. More than ever, we need to interact with the business and think and act more than just as lawyers. Increasingly, lawyers have an important role in our company, being a strategic partner in the creation of new business and project developments, having a role that demands agility skills as well as the know-how to work in a multidisciplinary way and how to deal at times with uncertain environment. The growing development of the process of automation and by empowering our internal clients through good legal training and other tools implemented, has allowed us to invest part of our time visiting our stores, which has helped us understand more deeply the business and to be able to add value where the company really needs our support. We accomplish this mainly by identifying possible relevant risks and discussing how to manage these properly through innovative and practical solutions derived from the experience of knowing our business in-depth and its processes from beginning to end.
