About

The Mexican legal team of Japan Tobacco International (JTI), the world’s third largest tobacco company, has actively tracked changes to legislation in recent times, to maintain the success of the company. On these recent developments Edgar Martinez, legal and corporate affairs manager for JTI México, says: ‘Our team has developed a quite simple, yet extremely effective data-base for tracking new legislation. The goal is tracking any bill presented either in congress or in senate, while comparing it with legislation in other parts of the world’. Martinez joined in 2014 and created the legal department with the collaboration of his regional and headquarter-based colleagues. During the past two years the legal team has grown to three members. The team is helping not only with Mexican matters, but also matters for other countries in the region including Colombia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Nicaragua. When hiring individuals to join the team, Martinez looks for exceptional talent and has selected his team from the students he teaches private international law to. ‘They both were outstanding students that is why I invited them to join the legal team. I think of my team not as a group of lawyers perceived as the “sales prevention department”, but rather a business partner with legal background’. Operating in the tobacco business, which is a notoriously highly-regulated sector, requires thorough legal assessment and adaptation for everything the company does, including product manufacture, through importation, marketing and sales. In order to stay abreast of this restrictive environment the team has updated the contract management policy not only to mirror key elements of the company’s global policy, but to adapt it to the ever-changing environment that Mexico faces in relation to tobacco regulation. However, because of this constant flux Martinez believes that their approach in Mexico has been replicated in other JTI subsidiaries across the world: ‘Our local policy has inspired changes in the policies of Canada and the US, specifically in relation to intercompany agreements and their management’. The team is constantly informing the business of possible future legislation and participating in strategies to adapt to potential changes. Recently the team have also been involved in various large-scale negotiations and executions of a new distribution agreement on a national level.