Team size: six

Major legal advisers: Arias, Holland & Knight

What are the most significant cases or transactions you and your team have been involved in?

The company went through a corporate restructuring process to make it more efficient; it was a complex process as the company was structured based in multiple jurisdictions of Mexico, Central America, and Europe. It was challenging for our team to handle different regulations simultaneously concerning mergers, spin-offs, unit sales, migration of entities (re domiciliation) to complete the process and comply with all the relevant regulations. We have collaborated with external advisors in México, Panamá, Netherlands, Luxembourg, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Guatemala whilst handling logistics of different time zones. It required significant amount of commitment, enthusiasm, and communication skills. Yet, we successfully completed the projects.

What do you think are the biggest risks facing your industry now and how are you preparing your team and organization to deal with them? 

The industry is facing challenges in different areas of work: strategy, finance, technology, compliance, health and safety, people, operation. To deal with risks and uncertainties, the focus should be defining what the risks and processes are for different scenarios. Legal team takes the role of supporting compliance department to make a risk management plan for the business whilst suggesting the way to mitigate risks. To reduce risks, the business in the industry has to develop their ability to identify, analyse, monitor, and establish politics while processing to implement controls for all the different types of risks.

Even in the best-case scenario, COVID is likely to have far-reaching ramifications. How are you safeguarding the long-term health of the business?

The company prioritises employees’ health more than anything. Give that the pandemic has not finished yet, priority for shareholders is still to keep everyone safe and healthy. There is a special committee for healthcare, implementing new protocols in restaurants and offices to track employees’ health on a daily basis. The protocols are reviewed constantly and updated based on newly published information. The company also has a business clinic with the presence of medical professionals.