About

With annual revenues of around $11.5bn, Chile’s state owned copper mining company is the largest producer of copper in the world and a lynchpin of the country’s economy. The company’s size and profile allows it to attract the country’s best legal talent, and a perfect demonstration of this came when Codelco hired Nicolai Bakovic in October 2016. Bakovic gained recognition in the Chilean in-house legal market through his work at renewable energy company Pacific Hydro between 2006 and 2009, and then at global engineering and construction company Bechtel between 2009 and 2015. At Bechtel he was first hired as regional counsel in Latin America (2009-2012) before being assigned to senior legal counsel role in Brisbane, Australia (2013-2014). Of his time in Australia, Bakovic says it ‘helped me broaden my legal knowledge, allowing me to work with other colleagues in the delivery of solutions to complex projects in remote locations, such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, understanding the particularities of different jurisdictions, their risks and how such risks can be mitigated contractually and commercially’. Between 2015 and 2016, Bakovic was the regional counsel and then director of corporate affairs of Komatsu Latin America. Now at Codelco, in his current role as legal vice president and general counsel Bakovic heads a team of 24 lawyers, one paralegal and seven secretaries. Despite his relatively recent arrival at Codelco, he is already getting to grips with the company’s operations and is currently working to establish a system for managing all documents issued by the legal department to ‘save time and allow us to have a consistent approach to legal problems across the different divisions of Codelco’. Because of Codelco’s status as a state company, its size and the fact that it’s an important contributor to the Chilean Treasury, Bakovic is acutely aware ‘that decisions made by Codelco need to be analysed not only from a commercial and legal perspective, but also from the perspective of its multiple stakeholders’. And for Bakovic ‘that requires putting yourself in the shoes of those stakeholders, which makes the decision making process longer and more complex’.