About

CCU is a Chilean diversified beverage company with operations in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Colombia. With over $2bn in annual revenue, it is Chile’s largest brewer, its largest bottler of mineral water, second largest wine producer and third largest soft drink producer. Felipe Benavides joined the company in March 2015 and leads a team of 17 employees in his role as legal affairs manager, 15 (12 lawyers) of which are based in Chile. In addition to this management role he is the secretary of CCU’s Board of Directors and also a member on the Board of Directors for CCU’s international subsidiaries in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. After Benavides’ appointment, the legal department began to acquire a regional responsibility overseeing legal matters for the company’s overseas subsidiaries. As a result of his internal changes to the team, it is now ‘more closely related to headquarters’ and can offer more support, according to Benavides. Following new regulations relating to the labelling of non-alcoholic beverages with a high sugar or calorie content, Benavides and his team have been recognised for ‘working closely with the industrial department in order to look in detail at the components of such products and determine which will have to be labelled, and also reviewing all marketing materials’. Before joining CCU, Benavides worked at SMU, Chile’s largest supermarket chain by number of stores, between 2013 and 2015. As SMU’s general counsel he is particularly proud of successfully renegotiating credit facilities after covenants within them had been broken. He also restructured the whole legal department there by creating a real estate legal team, a labour legal team, and reinforcing the corporate legal management. Of his time at SMU, Benavides says, ‘this was my first experience as an in-house lawyer and it obliged me to look deep into the necessities of my internal clients, and figure out what was the best and most efficient way to fulfil their needs’. Benavides also spent over 11 years at the Chilean law firm Cariola Diez & Perez Cotapos, in two separate stints between 2001 and 2013, either side of a spell at the New York office of Debevoise & Plimpton as international associate between 2007 and 2008. In 2007, Benavides also completed an LLM at the Duke University School of Law in North Carolina.