About

Since the recent arrival of Felipe Bunster Echenique to the position of corporate manager of legal affairs of the Chilean insurance company Mutual de Seguridad, the organisation’s 24-person legal department introduced fundamental changes to the way the company faces its trials, whilst in the process obtaining more favourable results with less exposure or bad social reputation to the company. Bunster adds that the team has also managed to lower the amount it spends on external lawyers, and ‘perhaps for the first time in the history of the company, reduce the amount of receivables that the company has, as well as the amount of fines imposed by different government entities’. The team, which at present is co-managed by vice president of legal affairs Soledad Elizalde and vice manager of regulatory affairs and compliance María Cecilia Jimenez, has also alongside the company’s IT department introduced new technology that enables various paperless legal documents to be requested by anyone within the company who needs the team’s help via a simple display. This has undoubtedly smoothened workloads for the department, improving operational efficiency and leaving space for the team to dedicate more time on strategic and transactional advice. This has served as a boost to the company as the team’s role in important deals has long been recognised internally as highly valuable, well in excess of the administrative support provided by lawyers in other businesses. In the last two years alone, the team has facilitated a variety of deals, such as, among others, Mutual de Seguridad’s sale of clinics in Arica in the north of Chile, three successful bids to provide service to BHP, Antofagasta Minerals and Anglo American and a major contract with Microsoft. The team’s role in allowing the company to deal with regulatory change is also well known. According to Bunster, it involves ‘a lot of study and adaptation to the new demands and a lot of training for internal and external people associated with the company’.