What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Caracol is rapidly expanding its business operations and has recently positioned itself as a first-class provider of production services in Colombia. This has impacted our legal team in various ways. It has required us to learn how major platforms conduct their business and negotiate production agreements; most importantly, we have had to international production standards while ensuring that our company’s proven experience in the field offers these international clients added value for producing entertainment in Colombia. In this sense, the opportunity to work with legal and production teams from major players in the industry, such as Netflix and Amazon, has been both challenging and rewarding since it has allowed us to apply many of these first-class production values to our local practice.

What do you predict will be the biggest change in the legal market over the next few years?

In line with my previous response, I believe Colombia’s positioning as a production hub for all types of entertainment will bring relevant changes to our practice in intellectual property and entertainment law. The industry will require lawyers familiar with the production process and the industry, not just the theory of intellectual property law. For our local industry, I believe the input of in-house counsel will become even more critical, with a growing necessity of clearing rights for productions that will be watched globally. I firmly believe that our job will become more and more preventive instead of reactive; production companies will require their counsel to accompany the production process from inception, and our legal input will prove essential in every step of the process, something I find incredibly exciting.

As we enter the next decade, what skills will an in-house lawyer need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

Most industries evolve faster than the law, particularly the entertainment industry. The latter changes much quicker than our local intellectual property laws can adjust, so it is up to us, as lawyers, to learn and adapt to the needs of the industry and provide our in-house clients with what they need, protecting them from legal risks. It is up to us to stay updated on our industry’s needs to predict risks and remain knowledgeable about the international aspects of our practice. To succeed as an in-house lawyer for an industry with the potential to reach foreign markets, we must strive to expand our knowledge so that our practice does not become localised.