How do you feel the pandemic has changed the world of work for in-house counsel and the function of the general counsel?
The pandemic introduced a new reality to all of us; the digital world evolved in ways that we could have never imagined before. This posed a huge challenge for in-house counsel as we had to train our team members and the company employees with digital tools to maintain business continuity. The remote working trend will continue, and in-house counsel will be required to be more tech-savvy in their own industry.
Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?
Having focused on training our clients on key topics for the business such as competition law principles, data protection and anti-corruption matters, we have successfully implemented compliance programmes in our company. The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) department is part of my team. To promote CSR, we participated in vaccination campaigns such as ‘Dile Sí a la Vacunación’ whilst establishing vaccination digital platform, ‘Pasaporte de la Vacunación.’ Whilst liasing with the Ecuador government, we implemented three vaccination centres in Quito, Guayaquil, and Esmeraldas, vaccinating more than 35,000 individuals including our employees, our business partners and their family, neighbouring communities, and our business suppliers. Another great initiative led by the CSR department is the ‘Siembra por Contrato’ program which promotes the cultivation of corn, rice, and barley, to transform the lives of small Ecuadorian farmers. These products are used to manufacture our beer Nuestra Siembra, the only beer in Ecuador which has 70 percent or more of local ingredients. This program already benefited 10,818 small farmers and it is expected to benefit 178,000 farmers more over the next five years.
What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?
Our legal team has focused on reinforcing compliance culture in our company whilst promoting our position as a key business partner. Instead of wasting our time on mundane tasks, I focused on devoting my time to develop legal tech including contract management system and chat bots. This freed up some time for our in-house lawyers and allowed us to focus on strategic matters. Overall, this improved our legal service for our clients. Data protection legislation was approved in Ecuador this year. This is a huge challenge for our team since it will affect our work in compliance, requiring detailed legal technical knowledge and business experience to review the data protection compliance processes. In-house lawyers are expected to have deep business knowledge with the ability to take strategic business decisions not limited to legal ones.
