LATAM countries your role covers: México, Guatemala, Belice, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panamá, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia and Venezuela.

What are the most significant cases and transactions in the LATAM region that you or your legal team have recently been involved in?

Over the past year, I have been dedicated to outlining the legal plan to support our major brands, along with sourcing innovation projects to expand our product portfolio in the region. Additionally, I have focused heavily on managing a wide scale of external factors related to business growth, leading us to depend on risk mitigation tools to navigate through periods of legal uncertainty.

From a broader point of view, the legal practice areas we have covered during the previous fiscal year in the region mainly concerned Trade and Antitrust Law, ExIm controls, administrative law and regulatory practice, legal compliance, and Marketing and Media Law.

What are your organisations plans in the LATAM region over the next 12 months and how will your legal expertise help to achieve these plans?

Overall, the plans are aimed at maintaining growth momentum in the region and supporting core brands, as well as focusing on innovation to accelerate the expansion of our product portfolio, while managing our P&L sustainability.

Beyond legal expertise and continuous training, I believe the legal function should support the achievement of these objectives is by leveraging both compliance responsibility and the ability to acquire a deep knowledge and understanding of the needs of the business and the client.

To achieve these objectives, our legal department is expected to create a safe and secure environment to operate in and focus on the dynamics of growth, as well as a cross-functional partnership with key stakeholders, including external counsel and external legal vendors, with a smart collaborative approach. Our efforts to stay one step ahead of the capabilities of the legal layer and bring greater value to the business are inherently oriented towards becoming legal managers rather than lawyers.

How do you adapt your legal counselling to align with the diverse business practices and customs of various LATAM countries?

The in-house legal industry is evolving rapidly as the business continues to grow. Being adaptable is the key to delivering legal solutions in a hybrid working environment where the pace of business is rapidly increasing. This indicates that at Ferrero, our legal counselling has embraced an innovative mindset to introduce capabilities and agility for implementing new approaches to in-house client management. This is especially crucial in a region characterised by a various diverse jurisdiction.

Essentially, I am referring to the legal design thinking methodology, which involves gathering tasks and identifying pain points from each user (client) during idea generation sessions and within legal business working groups and forums.

The application of the legal design thinking in our legal operations enables us to communicate and convey the legal message in a business-oriented manner. It also empowers us to harness legal operations to provide a more effective and versatile service.

In my opinion, design is crucial to seek balance across diverse geographic regions with distinct business practices because it offers us a cross-border perspective on the applicability of principles, allowing us to unify our legal strategies and manage risk mitigation throughout the region. Our adaptation strategy aims at working consistently with concrete data in a collaborative and multidisciplinary manner to deliver legal solutions.