About

Assistant general counsel at América Móvil since 2001 (when the company was spun off from former parent, Telmex), Daniel Tapia directly manages a sizeable team of 36, and has18 legal directors of the company’s subsidiaries reporting to him, each of which has its own team. Integrally involved in the restructuring of the department, he has overseen its development from undertaking little more than coordination to a being a unit structured ‘as an internal legal firm’, allowing most work to be brought in-house. With this restructuring has come the establishment of controls on inter-company operations, policies governing confidentiality and information security, and a logging system to permit greater efficiency in the follow up of both internal and external matters. The company has experienced what he calls ‘vertiginous growth’ over the last decade and Tapia has played a key part in a series of transactions that have given the company operations throughout the Americas (nine Central American and Caribbean states, eight South American states plus the US), and culminating, at least in a symbolic sense, with the 2010 acquisition of its former parent company. He is particularly proud of the team’s success in winning tenders to operate mobile telephony services in Panama, Uruguay and Peru, but acknowledges the difficulty of maintaining control of internal and external matters throughout this growth period. Other challenges have been the need to enter new business areas, principally content and publicity, and ‘knowing how to generate synergies [from this growth] from the legal perspective’. Drawing satisfaction from the fact that ‘our work is done in house’ and that he is not simply ‘a coordinator of external firms’, he jokes that the latter, ‘should be looking to build long-term relations and not want to retire on the earnings of their first mandate’.