About

Cotemar, the international offshore oil field technology and logistics company, has a major presence in Mexico with its vast access to the oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico. General counsel Alejandro Fernández Ramirez Buendia leads the legal team of 12 lawyers and support staff. Within the team, there are three senior lawyers that report to him directly. They are Mauricio Villarreal who is in charge of all corporate, financial and custom issues of the company; Maria Fernanda Tirado who is responsible for the energy matters of the company, and Beatriz Peralta, who is the responsible for the litigation department, including labour, commercial and administrative matters. The three are all supported by their respective teams. The team has made some important changes in the last year relating to performance metrics, with Fernández explaining that, ‘as an in-house legal team, we need to be aligned with all company standards, such as reports, goals [and] metrics. In that sense, we developed two major changes in the legal department. First, we developed a chart indicator that measures the results, number of cases, payback of the legal team, savings that we produce to the company, risk, and others, which helps us to be more strategic when we make decisions. Also, we contribute to the company’s KPIs and major objectives that are included into the corporate strategy of 2018-2021’. In addition, the team developed in-house software, jointly with Cotemar´s IT department, called “LEGUM”. This programme manages all the litigations and provides reports of how, when, where and what is going on with the litigation process, in order to see how it is evolving and to foresee the need to take action. The team also participated in a public bid process where Cotemar won two license contracts for the extraction and production of oil and gas in Veracruz, a transaction that is currently still in progress.