About

The Continental Mexico legal department provides high quality services to the company across Mexico and Latin America. General counsel Luis Enriquez de Rivera is the head of the department and oversees the activities of the team members. He also takes care of special projects, specifically M&A operations, antitrust, lawsuits, greenfield projects, union negotiations and any other major legal operations requiring collaboration with either the US or German headquarters. There are three direct reports to the head, divided in three areas of expertise: commercial law, compliance and labour. The deputy general counsel, Fernanda Morales de la Torre, oversees all commercial and corporate matters; managing a team of four lawyers that are located throughout Mexico, strategically situated to provide legal services to the 23 locations with around 26,000 employees in Mexico only; making it Continental’s biggest footprint outside Germany. The compliance manager is Fabiola Carrillo, who has been part of the team since 2015. Recently she implemented a different way of making compliance and ethics interesting and memorable for employees by what she called ‘the Compliance Games’, in search of a long-term learning and knowledge retention, with the result of genuine employee engagement. Ana Marroquin, oversees the labour department and is located at Guadalajara. She holds a yearly event, a HR legal workshop, where she explains in detail to all the HR managers various important labour topics from a legal perspective which has proven the minimal amount of labour lawsuits that the company has in Mexico. The team operates with flexible working options, including home office, flexitime and sabbaticals. These advantages have been truly applied by this legal team while also setting an example to other departments since they foster the perfect environment for achieving a personal work-life balance and gender diversity. 2018 was a very challenging year for the legal team, several important projects were successfully handled by the group. During this year it handled the expansion of the Cuautla plant, involving a very complex purchasing of adjacent plots, which were owned by a local realtor, but had some liens and encumbrances; while some of the plots were owned by the Federal Treasury, involving public bidding processes. Additionally, the team successfully collaborated in the lease and development of the Prisma building, which shelters a new R&D centre at Querétaro. Enriquez de Rivera highlights that, ‘We are very proud of all the achievements of this year, it proves that we are a result driven team and all these goals were successfully closed due to a big team effort that involved long hours, with the application of creative legal structures and solutions, and of course, teamwork and lot of passion! It’s worth mentioning that the vast majority of the team is comprised of female talent, not by gender quota, [but] by happening naturally by having the most qualified attorneys possible’.