About

ABB Chile, the Chilean branch of ABB Group, is a specialist technology and engineering company specialising in robotics and motion, electrification products, industrial automation, and power grids across 130 countries globally. Since 2003 the legal function in Chile has been headed by Andrea Lira Droguett, legal and integrity manager and compliance officer. She created the legal department in Chile when she joined and has worked to develop it since applying the global company standards to the Chilean legal sphere. In particular, Lira says that, legal and integrity counsel Gabriel Venegas, ‘has been a key incorporation from 2016 until today. [Due to] his past experience in law firms he has been able to bring support to different areas of ABB, without the need of an external legal advisor, especially in human resources, health and safety and also in local intellectual property issues’. She also highlights that the team’s biggest challenge operating in Chile is to apply the company’s European guidelines to local law, with an eye towards the business needs of the company and the changeable labour laws. The team fulfils this and more as demonstrated by its innovative implementation of technology into its systems. Lira says that ABB Chile ‘pioneers in the development of a new tool for the review and approval of legal documents such as offers, contracts, letters of award, change orders, power of attorney etc.’. The system, launched in 2016, is called “Sales Pursuit Tool” (SPT) and it operates on the computers and smartphones of the team. This innovation has saved time, increased productivity, and allowed the team to be mobile and adaptive to client needs making it highly valuable to the business. As a result, it has been expanded to other countries due to its success in Chile. The team is now developing the technology to include online monitoring of major legal issues, trials, contract negotiation and integrity cases from ABB Group worldwide. In addition to this new technology implementation, the team has recently made industry history by partnering with the Ukrainian extra-large capacity airplane Antónov ASTC, to carry one of the biggest loads in history when delivering oversized transformers to ABB Chile’s client Colbún in 2016. The department has also added to its reputation for integrity by becoming certified by Company BH Compliance, for the adoption and implementation to prevent corporate crimes according to Chilean law no. 20.393 for a term of two years. Lira says that ‘this represents a major step forward in the public image of ABB in Chile in front of our authorities and also towards our clients, always in the search of being one of the top companies in our country strongly compromised with our values’.