About

‘If all you do is provide great legal advice, we might as well go to a law firm’. This comment, shared by a top executive in a Johnson Controls’ legal department reunion, has marked the in-house career of Rodrigo Montemayor. At that time group counsel for JC’s Power Solutions division, Montemayor is today regional general counsel and institutional relations director for Owens Corning’s building materials, composite solutions and roofing & asphalt divisions, with responsibilities including transactional activity, institutional relations and compliance matters. ‘The key to success as an in-house counsel’, he comments, ‘is to be a true business partner; to understand business from every perspective, with the purpose of providing advice that is rounded, effective and adds value. To do that it is important to spend time in each business area, understand its operation, its objectives, opportunities and risks, and to adopt their challenges as one’s own. Without that, there is no true integration of the in-house lawyer into the business’. To this end he has challenged his legal team to develop. Recognizing that, split between Mexico and Brazil, it effectively functioned as two distinct units, he set out to break down the language-barrier, initiating intensive language training and weekly calls between offices during which each lawyer reported his/her activity in the language he/she was learning. In addition to attending to such cultural intangibles, Montemayor has overhauled the department’s contract writing and approval process, resulting in notable efficiency gains (not least from an auditing perspective); and developed the company’s corporate and institutional relations capacity in the region. Externally, he is particularly proud of the company’s resolution of the veto imposed by CADE (the Brazilian competition authority) regarding its 2007 acquisition of a reinforced glass-fibre plant in Capivari, Brazil, from French group Saint-Gobain, which led to the sale of that facility to China’s Chongqing Polycomp International Corporation (CPIC) in 2011. Motivated by the challenge of working in a multidisciplinary environment where ‘one can see how legal contributions materialise in projects or in opportunities that add value’, he regards the chances to learn as enormous, although they require ‘an open mind to see and grasp business issues from an integrated perspective that takes on the relevant commercial, financial and operative aspects as much as the legal ones’.