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We are currently in a divestiture process and we are only two lawyers looking up for the Centam Region (Honduras, Panamá and Costa Rica). Our roles are of giving daily support to the day-to-day operations issues as well as being a key role in the divestiture process.
Aside from the divestiture process, we had a key role in the construction of new state of the art campus in Costa Rica. Being key players in the regional process to help Laureate becoming public in NASDAQ.
The economic recession in Central America, together with a divestiture process took us to a point in which we had to significantly reduce our legal department as well as outside counsel budget. Taking care of duties that were executed by other members of the original team and to take care of the daily shores together with the divestiture process has been a great opportunity to choose priorities and manage a very organized agenda.
Basically in the next six months the divestiture process must be concluded, and we should have a great performance to be taken into consideration either to stay in Laureate or with the new owners.
We are currently working with the PeopleSoft programs that have helped us keep track of every process and contract.
We are a really positive team that can easily adapt to sudden changes. Resilience, leadership and credibility are words that are constantly used by third parties to describe our team. We have been internally chosen by Laureate as the most reliable legal department in Latin America and locally we have been elected as the most trusted department.
Back in August 2018, Laureate International Education (hereinafter referred as, Laureate), the biggest and most relevant private education network in the world, released an official statement in which they announced the they will proceed to sell some of their worldwide operations including the Central American Region (Panamá, Costa Rica and Honduras). Upon this announcement, Laureate’s regional legal department understood the challenge to guide and lead the divestiture process so that it will turn into a total success, without neglecting the quality of daily services and internal clients. Nevertheless, the challenge became even bigger when the management decided to considerably reduce not only the legal department but also the budget for external counsel fees. Surrounded by the logical uncertainty a divestiture process can create and with limited resources, the legal department was faced with a difficult task to do a lot more with reduced inside and outside support. At this point the legal department had to establish the proper steps to be a key role throughout the divestiture process and agreed with management about the best mechanisms to guarantee the customary support of the daily shores. To accomplish such a complex task, the legal regional department introduced internal tools that will aloud the proper administration of projects that shall guarantee the required control of the sale process. When a department finds itself shorthanded to complete their daily shores, they have to become creative and open minded. Artificial intelligence was a key role to continue granting the day by day services. We established a state of the art technological mechanism to guarantee the proper flow of contract approvals, granting the business flexibility and a self-service concept that help us take care exclusively of the revision of contracts, while the request and approval process was being taking care by a software. This new process has proven to be bullet proof in case of any internal or external audits. Most important, and with the sole purpose of guarantying that the educative institutions met both the legal and regulatory requirements throughout the sale process, The Management and the legal department jointly agreed that the latter will get actively involved in the administration of other areas, such as human resources, commercial and finance. This transcendental decision helped the legal department not only become a strategical partner of the different institutions but also assume a leading role for the proper operation of them. As a result of the high credibility and the solid professional and personal credentials of the surviving members of the legal department, we played and important roll to administrate the generalized uncertainty generated by the situation we were experiencing as a region. Such role took the legal department to the point in which we had to verify all the updates the employees were receiving regarding the divestiture process, so they can stay focused on their duties. Finally, it is important to highlight that the sale process has been very success and the business seems to be getting stronger. The legal department is no longer just a strategical partner but a leader for the adequate administration and consolidation of the educative institutions.
