About

The past 24 months have seen exciting developments at leading global pulp and paper company CMPC’s in-house legal function, under the company’s extremely capable chief legal officer and corporate secretary Rafael Cox Montt. He considers improvements made to the risk management process at the company that he has spearheaded as particularly bold and effective: ‘In addition to and in accordance with the assessment commented on before, the board of directors changed the structure and the way our risks are managed. The governance of the risk management process was set under my supervision since the end of 2018. From there, I have been working in reforming the process and designing the new structure of a new strategy that must be presented for approval of the board in the following months. The new system must have the ability to put CMPC in the level of the best practices in the matter currently available, and specially, to consider risk as an essential tool to achieve CMPC’s forward strategy’. When purely considering the legal aspect of Cox’s remit, developments have been just as pronounced, with the in-house legal department being considerably strengthened according to a new strategic vision. ‘From 2017 to 2019 the department has changed dramatically’, Cox says. ‘The numbers of lawyers working internally has grown significantly, and now we have more than 40 lawyers working across Latin America. As well as this, we are in the process of the implementation of legal technology in order to be more efficient in our handling of legal issues, and have attached legal personnel directly with certain business units. Cristóbal Somarriva, for instance, is the new head of legal for our consumers division and has more than 12 lawyers under his supervision’. Cox himself continues to be among the most respected in-house counsel in the region on the back of his excellent performance at a company at the forefront of its sector.