Team size: Four

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

We are currently working on a big M&A project to acquire several sites (SBA is a company dedicated to building and buying telecom sites to later lease space in the infrastructure to mobile network operators). Since this project is ongoing, it is confidential, and I cannot be more specific about it. I believe we will close at the end of this year. We have acquired several sites from our usual sellers regarding the recently completed projects. M&A transactions are hard work for the in-house legal department as we only hire vendors for specific tasks that we cannot execute ourselves, such as obtaining liens’ and encumbrances’ certificates from properties throughout the whole country. Part of our work is clearing the legal real estate portion of the due diligence, so we know the property and the telecom site built therein have no issues. We must also closely examine the ground lease executed with the landlord and the agreements performed with the mobile network operators to verify there will be no issues in the future once the sites are ours.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?

This is crucial as SBA is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ) in the United States and must meet detailed FCPA and anti-corruption compliance requirements. Therefore, our vendors must be perfectly aligned with anti-corruption guidelines and parameters and with compliance with local law, not just regarding these matters but all local legislation. Additionally, the company feels safe and well-supported while working with firms that have no problem executing all documents we require to ensure they are aligned.

In general, what would you like to see change about the external law firms you use?

One of the things that law firms need to change is their tendency to prepare a formal, lengthy memo for every matter they are consulted with, which is often divided into legal background, case law, analysis and conclusions. Their first reaction should be to double-check if the client needs this because the client often wants the decision in an email. The legal analysis usually does not concern the company, only the outcome. Another matter that would generate a positive impact is incorporating the culture of reporting updates that a law firm handles. Frequently, the in-house lawyer or someone from the company needs to actively follow up on the matter because they do not know the status of it.