About

Yara is the world’s largest mineral fertiliser company, which has almost 15,000 employees and sales in nearly 160 countries. Since its inception in 1905, Oslo-headquartered Yara has grown to provide 20 million farmers with crop nutrition products, solutions and knowledge that help feed over 300 million people. Supporting a geographically and scientifically complex company requires an exceptional legal team across the world. The Colombian portion of the legal team consists of eight lawyers, including the legal director for Latin America (excluding Brazil) Mónica Durán. Upon joining the Latin American team in 2015, Durán immediately began a reorganisation of the department in order to separate ‘the roles of lawyers according to the business lines present in the company: Industrial, Crop Nutrition and Production’. This structural change allowed each of the lawyers in the team to ‘provide additional support across the region’ of 10 countries, which was crucial considering the continuing growth of Yara’s operations. The team has supported Yara’s expansion by advising on ‘acquisitions and tax efficiency-driven mergers within the group, creating standardised templates for operational contracts and implementing the General Terms and Conditions for the Sale of Product, according to each country’s local regulations’, according to Durán. The legal team has also sought to improve the legal knowledge of business counterparts by ‘strengthening internal training in competition law, to ensure compliance to local regulations in all our areas of operation’. This constant business alignment means that Durán and the team avoid ‘isolated theoretical legal opinion’, and seek to be a part of the decision-making process for the company.