About

Though headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the Latin America division of Microsoft has a strong presence in each of its subsidiaries across the region. Supporting these operations is assistant general counsel Robert Ivanschitz, who leads a group of 37 full-time employees in the central legal function alongside sizable teams based in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Peru. The Latin America legal team is divided into four main areas, covering: commercial and transactional work; government affairs; corporate philanthropy; and cyber security. This huge range of activities means that a great deal of Ivanschitz’s time is spent making sure his team has the resources, capacities and skills to support the business. While maintaining team cohesion can be challenging over such a large number of markets, working in a company like Microsoft helps. ‘There is a lot of technology we can leverage to help overcome physical distances and create common legal team. SharePoint allows us to work with a common stockroom of documents and other technologies allow us to work across borders’, he says. Ivanschitz has also been closely involved in some of Microsoft’s most important matters across Latin America, including the provision of cloud services, tax collection, citizenship support services and election management software to a number of governments. Microsoft frequently shares information on cyber threats, along with highly sophisticated software to combat these threats, with governments and large institutions across the region and has occasionally filed its own law suits to help identify those responsible for security breaches. One of the biggest challenges facing cloud providers is moving data from one country to another in a secure and compliant fashion. While some regions, notably the European Union, have agreed a privacy shield to ensure data transfers comply with best-practice, Latin America is far more piecemeal. ‘We comply with European and US model clauses to help governments in the region get comfortable with the safe treatment of citizens’ data, but it is a process which requires me to work with regulators and large clients. It requires a lot of time and resources to do this, but by organising the team across industries we have learnt to service our clients much more effectively. The questions a large bank in Mexico might have are frequently the same as those a large bank in Brazil will have, and those questions will have often been addressed in another jurisdiction already’. The tendency of clients’ issues and questions to cluster by industry across geographies means Ivanschitz is able to leverage Microsoft’s powerful central legal team in Redmond, Washington. He reports to Rich Sauer, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and deputy general counsel and supporting lawyer to the company’s hugely influential head of global sales, marketing and operations, Jean-Philippe Courtois.