About

What started four years ago as a team formed by the talented legal and regulatory teams of two rival telecom providers in Mexico, has now been shaped into a team that combines the vast experience from the original teams in the telecommunications sector, with expertise from different industries through the addition of attorneys with different specialities over the past few years. The legal team at AT&T Mexico is led by George Troy Hatch, vice president of legal and regulatory, and contains 73 attorneys, economists, engineers and support staff, including a leadership team of four assistant vice presidents. These are Fernando Cabrera, assistant vice president, corporate and litigation; Peter Lynch, assistant vice president, integration, compliance, data protection and cybersecurity; Valeria Chapa, assistant vice president, operations, audit, controls and governance; and Antonio Diaz, assistant vice president, regulation. Early in 2018, AT&T´s commercial operations were divided into five regions – Central, Pacific/Bajio, South Pacific, North and North East – in addition to the company’s UNEFON brand being made a stand-alone business unit. This created the opportunity of appointing six members of the legal team to support the vice president general managers of these five regions and the UNEFON business. Several of them still play dual roles within the department, which not only enhances their experience as in-house counsel by coordinating legal matters for these regions, but also provides them the opportunity to continue supporting operations with their specific area of expertise. AT&T Mexico´s legal team has the capability of providing very sophisticated legal advice in-house, which go from fiercely defending telecom cases before the Mexican Supreme Court and participating in spectrum auctions, to supporting AT&T’s content strategy in media, music sports and entertainment, to handling commercial operations of over a thousand points of sale in the country. It can manage a complex litigation docket in a demanding and competitive environment, to managing legal strategies and policies in a range of different areas such as data privacy, data protection, data breaches, digital media and cybersecurity. The team has also promoted regulatory changes to implement IP interconnection, approve Mexico’s new numbering plan and introduce real time location for 911 emergency calls. At the end of the third quarter of 2018, AT&T Mexico reported 17.3 million subscribers in Mexico, which represents a 25% increase from the previous year and it continues to be the fastest growing wireless provider in Mexico. AT&T Mexico successfully obtained the required authorisations to participate in the auction of 2.5 GHz spectrum, in which AT&T Mexico obtained 80 MHz. With the support and coordination of the IFT and the FCC, it reached agreements with all other carriers in this band to relocate their spectrum holdings. This allowed AT&T Mexico to have contiguous (4G LTE suitable) spectrum in this band. The team has also worked on the acquisition of Time Warner globally, which has greatly increased the entertainment content and music industry elements of the business. Hatch sums up the team’s quality by explaining: ‘Few legal teams in Mexico can handle the vast array of matters in-house as the AT&T legal and regulatory department does and we couldn’t do it so successfully without our collaborative team culture’.