About

The legal team covering the Northern Region of Latin America for telecommunications conglomerate AT&T is a relatively new one – in the last two years alone a third of the headcount has been new hires. Despite this, the 21 lawyers and 15 non legal staff covering Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and the Caribbean, have generated an impressive impact for AT&T. Led by Juan Camilo Castro Salcedo, legal director for the Latin America North Region, the legal department has driven monetary savings, reduced market risk, and stimulated regulatory change. As a prime example of the work the team has done, Castro Salcedo points to a demonstrable impact on the company’s bottom line. After developing and executing a new strategy, the team obtained ‘a renewal of the TV license fee with savings for the company of US $3m each year (the renewal was for 10 years). The construction of the legal arguments to support the strategy of the TV license renewal, meant that the team had to interact with three different regulators and get positive inputs to obtain the final reduction’. The team has also been able to reduce AT&T’s subjection to common legal risks in the Colombian market. There have been several labour legislation changes across the region, meaning that the team has had to ‘anticipate in order to provide the appropriate feedback to the business to run it with the minimum impact’. The forward-looking approach of the AT&T legal team has enabled it to shape the company’s industry in many ways, often stating a position with regulators, and even in court, that affects the entire sector. As Castro Salcedo states: ‘In Colombia, we recently had a final favourable decision from the Civil Courts on an anti-trust trial initiated from local broadcasters against pay TV operators, asking for a payment regarding the IP rights associated with their open signals. The coordination of the legal team with the external counsels and the industry, got this positive decision that reversed the first instance decision and recognised that IP rights are limited because of the must carry obligations that pay TV operators have under the local law’. The team’s efforts to reduce customer and labour claims have also been exceptional in the last few years, leading project management and database initiatives to reduce the risk of fines for AT&T. The legal team’s ongoing success is largely down to the individual talents that are contained within the department. Castro Salcedo mentioned a number of his senior staff as exemplary of this quality: Alvaro Andrés Ponce, labour legal manager; Diego Calderón, legal manager Ecuador; Adolfo Millán, legal manager Venezuela; Sushilla Jadoonanan, legal manager Caribbean; Ana María Neira, legal chief regulatory matters; and Paula Catalina Vergara, legal chief Colombia.