Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

PGIM Real Estate focuses on reducing costs for our managed funds to maximise our clients’ investments. In that spirit, we have requested most of the law firms we work with for a “flat fee menu” for our most common matters to achieve standardisation (as much as possible) in the legal fees charged for the same type of matters across managed funds and law firms.

What are some of the main trends impacting the industry sector you work in in Mexico?

During the first half of the year, most of the buzz in the industrial real estate market is nearshoring. This trend has helped maintain stable asset valuations and a strong market as opposed to what has happened in the US. The second half of the year has been more focused on the impacts of the appreciation of the Mexican peso in a highly dollarised market.

Another trend in the industrial real estate market is the last-mile facilities for logistics, in which we see industrial facilities closer to the urban centre to facilitate e-commerce deliveries.

What measures has your company taken to embed sustainability practices into its core business operations, and how does the role of the general counsel contribute to driving and ensuring sustainable practices within the company?

Globally, the company has a high focus on ESG matters; there is an impact investing fund. Locally, we have implemented ESG practices in the company implementing policies to enforce it, and we wanted to pass this along to our value chain (tenants in the managed funds, suppliers). We have achieved this by including specific provisions in our contracts. Specifically for our outside counsel, we have implemented an annual report in which they inform us of their social responsibility initiatives and a DE&I questionnaire. We have tracked the responses yearly and seen this initiative’s impact. For example, last year, one of our law firms commented that they did not have a DE&I policy, and since it was one of the questions in our DE&I questionnaire, they wrote and implemented a DE&I policy.