About

Jacobo Cohen Imach is general counsel of online retailer and auctioneer MercadoLibre. As one of Argentina’s most notable ecommerce businesses, and Latin America’s most popular in terms of numbers of website visitors, Imach’s attention is constantly focused on a variety of issues, but mainly those on the regulatory side of things. In addition to his legal role, Cohen has a remit that includes more corporate-focused responsibilities; he is the vice president for legal and public affairs at the company as well as the secretary of the board of directors. Overseeing a large team that includes five direct reports and a total of 40 staff in the legal and public affairs team, his career is intricately tied to the pioneering online retailer’s story; he is the company’s first general counsel and has been in the position since the company’s creation in 1999. During his long tenure he has seen fit to make numerous changes to the workings of the legal department, including emphasising in-house lawyers as ‘strategic partners as part of the business, not an outside group that puts stick on the wheels’, promoting the values of ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘applying common and business sense’. Keen to safeguard the ‘creativity, innovation, development of products, services and content hosted in their servers, user privacy, freedom of expression and other issues’, Cohen is a vital component in the growth of one of Argentina’s most successful internet companies and the development of the ecommerce sector as a whole.