Team size: Ten

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

Resilience is more than just being able to deal with setbacks in a positive way. It also entails our ability to adapt in the face of challenging situations and maintain stable mental well-being, which is a vital skill for lawyers and businesses. Over the last few years, resilience has become an integral part of our mainstream conversation. Discussing the difficult parts of the day with our colleagues or engaging in light-hearted conversations has become one of the most important aspects of maintaining our well-being and improving our health and outlook.

For instance, at Cementos Pacasmayo, we have fostered a culture that understands the importance of employee well-being and has implemented measures to support our staff, ensuring resilience within our business and legal teams during periods of instability or crises. We have adopted a more collaborative approach, emphasising empathy, team building, talent recognition, and coaching.

Additionally, we have improved our well-being, health, and outlook by incorporating breaks, establishing work boundaries, prioritising fun and relaxing activities, and promoting work-life balance and mental health. Furthermore, we are currently implementing and maintaining an effective business continuity plan based on ISO 22301 standards for security and resilience in business continuity management.

In a nutshell, our approach to managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and aligning our legal strategy with the broader business strategy to ensure resilience primarily involves careful decision-making guided by corporate values, proactive planning, conducting mock dawn raids, crisis simulations involving other teams, getting an initial understanding of the facts, securing evidence, identifying the root cause of the crisis, individuals involved, potential conflicts of interest, assigning responsibilities, how to communicate, selecting spokespersons for the organisation, and conducting internal and external briefings, reporting, and remediation efforts.

Finally, an essential part of our business continuity plan involves the post-crisis phase, where it is necessary to rebuild our reputation and brand while learning lessons for continuous improvement.

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?

Cementos Pacasmayo’s mission is “to build together the future we dream of.” This is a central driver of our corporate strategy and our sustainability practices and initiatives. Our business is committed to pursuing sustainable practices, including greatly reducing carbon emissions – striving toward net-zero by 2050 – as well as committing to goals in other environmental, social, and governance (ESG) wide-ranging topics and reporting against those ESG metrics. Meanwhile, governments and regulators are quickly enacting more laws and regulations that require all companies to pay much more attention to sustainability or face legal consequences.

This combination of sustainability commitments and legislative developments has led to even more public scrutiny of corporate behaviour and complexities around sustainability governance. It has considerably raised the profile, responsibilities, and contribution of the general counsel in addressing sustainability broadly, requiring them to have independent, balanced, and informed judgment, as well as a broader perspective.

For instance, in my role as general counsel and compliance officer of Cementos Pacasmayo, I have direct responsibility for maintaining integrity and ethical behaviour, along with overseeing many other topics that fall under the governance umbrella. Additionally, I am responsible for encouraging the legal team to integrate sustainability principles into their function and across the wider business.

Furthermore, I am the ultimate authority for the quality, health, safety, and environmental department, with additional responsibilities for shaping our corporate sustainability principles. In fact, I serve as chairman of Pacasmayo’s Sustainable Committee, and I am exposed to board conversations on sustainability.