About

Rodrigo Mackenna Cooper has worked in-house for a range national businesses including large multinational corporations, covering different industries and types of businesses. According to him, ‘this means that I have been involved in and have worked in many branches of law, having to handle the concept of the “internal customer” and the relationship with the operation of the company’. In March 2014, he joined Australia-headquartered Transfield Services, now known as Broadspectrum, as general counsel for all the operations of the company in Chile. When Broadspectrum was acquired by the Spanish Ferrovial Group in 2016, Mackenna played an important role in the integration process and became general counsel of the Ferrovial Servicios companies in Chile. Ferrovial Servicios specialises in providing a different kind of industrial services for mining, energy, ports and general industry, which includes engineering, construction, environmental and project management services. In a short space of time he has restructured the legal team in terms of specialties related to the processes and legal matters that are required by the company’s operations. The changes have enabled him to establish the legal workflow in relation to the business and the support areas, setting down detailed internal procedures that are in turn taught to business peers across the relevant departments of the company. This was part of an initiative to instil the ‘education of the legal culture and risk protection’. As Mackenna says: ‘This has positively affected both the legal department and the different areas of the company, since the legal requirements are made on time and with the necessary information which benefits the times of response and quality of work. All this has also influenced the company’s financial issues, reflecting a notable decrease in labour and all kinds of litigation and associated costs, substantial savings in contractual penalties and lower external legal costs’. This is an especially important feature of his tenure as the changes coincide with the decline in the global market value of metals and especially copper, which of course caused significant strain on the company. Prior to 2014, Mackenna was chief legal counsel for over two years at SK Comercial, part of the SIGDO KOPPERS Group, a Chilean leader in implementing construction projects and large-scale industrial assembly and industrial provider to mining, energy and construction industries. Between 2010 and 2011, he was legal counsel at Consorcio a leading financial services group with assets totalling over $13bn, where he actively participated in all types of financing projects, regulated market and contracts. He also had a two and half year spell at law firm Pérez Donoso where he learned corporate law, tax and governance. This impressive career has led to many highlights for Mackenna, but he believes his best work has come out of complexity or uncertainty. He highlights restructuring companies in financially and operationally complicated circumstances, financing operations and corporate restructurings and the setup of legal risk matrices, models of contract negotiation, implementing uniform legal policies and procedures as some of his biggest career achievements.