About

The legal team at Falck – Grupo EMI, led by Nicolás Ruiz, legal and corporate affairs director Latin America, consists of four excellent lawyers and an assistant expertly managing the leading healthcare company’s legal business in Colombia. Legal counsel Liliana Toro reports directly to Ruiz and together with her team comprised of a junior lawyer and legal assistant, play a key role in providing support on contracts, tenders, data privacy and customer claims. The team is also joined by a legal relations leader who leads on individual and union labour matters and also reports to human resources. Due to recent growth, the company has brought in an additional lawyer to help to cope with the sheer volume of work. In addition the company acquired new operating licenses from the Colombian Health Superintendence, which allowed it to expand its operations to two new cities, Barranquilla and Cartagena. This entailed significant investments to be able to increase coverage and maintain the company’s position in the market. On top of an increase in workload and expansion of the business in Colombia, the team has worked on the simplification of the corporate structure across Latin America. This involved carrying out and obtaining approval from the Health Superintendence for a merger between two operating companies in Colombia. The National Health Superintendence issued the resolution approving the merger between Grupo EMI and the company Servicio de Emergencias Regional (SER). Therefore, EMI would proceed to absorb SER, which in addition entailed all the corporate clean-up and registrations for all the different branches and operations nationwide. The team also provided support in structuring and reviewing the different legal aspects of the new digital strategy of the company, with two main projects. These are the client portal, which is aimed at facilitating the interaction with subscribers, allowing them to access the client portal to obtain different types of services, such as a medical orientation chat, request a service for consultation at home, booking of appointments with specialists, accessing medical history and more; and the sales portal, which allows potential clients to subscribe to the team’s service in a manner which is 100% self-manageable, simplifying the sales process. Ruiz highlights that, ‘the legal team’s mind-set is to be a partner to the different areas of the company, having an in-depth understanding of the business, knowing the pain-points of the different areas and having lawyers work as valued members of the client’s team, who are always business oriented having always in mind the legal structure and limits, so there is risk management and controls in place, being cost sensitive and providing strategic and proactive advice’.