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Our legal department is structured to render strategic and business legal advice in the pursuit of growing and protecting 3M’s Central America’s operations (commercial operation within the region, internal services operation and manufacturing and supply chain operations, both for Latin America).
Our team is organised as follows: A general counsel for regional operations (Ivan E. Rojas Loynaz) heads the department, representing legal affairs in the managing operating committees of the commercial operations and the supply chain and manufacturing operations. He also supports all staff areas across the 3M operations, litigations, and specific support to the business areas in Central America and the Caribbean area. We have also two senior legal counsels, each one respectively supporting the service operation for Latin America from Costa Rica and the supply chain and manufacturing control tower for Latin America from Panama, including our manufacturing operations in Mexico and Brazil (Sebastian Wong and Maira Serrano). They also give specific support to three of the four business areas of the company in the Central America and Caribbean area. We also have the support of internships and in-plants to better render our services and be able to focus on the more strategic work streams rather than mere operational work.
Therefore, we have distributed our efforts across all the 3M operations in Central America, to bring efficiency and connectivity throughout our regional and Latin American operations for the purpose of alignment to the company strategy, leveraging both the use of technological tools and the implementation of efficiency projects for the sake of the transformation of our legal services, as much as the personal wellness and professional growth.
We have been involved in a large variety of matters, as we support four business groups, manufacturing ops, and services ops, (most of which are obviously confidential) within a range of areas, including labour, trade compliance, commercial, anti-trust and competition law, taxes, corporate, mergers and acquisitions, recalls. All such matters being big and impactful.
3M is living in an important moment of change, and our function’s task is to bring clarity and a global view to the areas we support so the change can be assumed and worked out successfully. Legal is the memory of the company, a sort of glue that will connect the past with the future.
Legal in 3M is complemented with what we call legal transformation, including the use of tools that will leverage our work bringing in more and more efficiency. Sometimes we are tempted to stay working just as we have been always, but once we realise the benefits of the technology and tools developed by others, we just can’t keep on moving forward without this.
We are legal professionals with a great acumen, and strong ethical values. We drive growth definitely and we are business partners all the way. We are just normal people with normal needs and high standards of professional principles and a will to serve the purposes of the company.
As companies grow and the pressures of the budget becomes more and more heavy, the staff areas like legal are hurried to become more efficient, which ultimately may means more work and less people. When addressing these kinds of challenges, the typical reaction may be fear and an overload of work. But a fantastic discovery happened to the Latin America teams of 3M, in which we have had to manage very important matters with less internal resources than we thought we would count on, and to that extent innovation became part of the rules, with an absolute resolution to become more efficient in what we do best and leave to others, mostly third parties what takes long periods of time and may not be adding that much of value, because there are other professionals in the law field that are actually better than us, in this type of work. So we realised that we have extraordinary capacities internally to add value as legal business partners. We know the operations in detail, we know the law, and we know the company’s strategy, so we do help a lot in the prevention field, in the accompaniment field, and in the conflict resolution field. This is before, during, and after the execution of the business. With that in mind we have developed and adjust technological tools that support our day-to-day, so we are not drawn in databases and in reports, then we receive full support from external expert lawyers in labour, anti-trust, corporate governance, litigation, IP, contractual and tax areas in which we are not experts and others add more value than us, lowering internal costs, and enhancing our own capabilities to add more value to the operations we serve. In Central America operations we have gained a lot of efficiency not only for ourselves but for Latin America, from the M&SCH (manufacturing and supply chain centralised operation in Panama) in which we have set our regional legal support for sourcing managed and developed by Maira Serrano, which manages to ‘automatise’ the creation of agreements and the direct support thru external lawyers in each of our locations in Latin America, all controlled and managed in Panama, leaving time for our business lawyers to actually be strategic, while the programme itself is purely strategical in a different manner. Also our services operation for Latin America in Costa Rica, supported by Sebastian Wong, actually advances in taking all the transactional work in our operations in the continent to leave only the strategic work for the business, and to that extent the lawyers in the team can also render the strategic services to the business as real partners, with enough time to focus on what adds value.
