What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

The most important challenge in the past year has been communication with external legal counsel, in the other countries in the region. Since 2021, and even in 2022, many of the countries maintained sanitary measures that caused the law firms to lose the quality of service that they were used to providing and for this reason, the response times of the requests were lengthened and it cost a bit more to execute what was planned. I think that by the end of 2022, the problem had disappeared and everything was back to normal.

In which ways have you attempted to bring the legal department closer to your business colleagues?

Grupo Garnier is made up of advertising and marketing agencies with a presence in the region, so the work environment is very dynamic and sometimes a bit informal. I believe that one of the main achievements of the legal department has been to create face-to-face talks and spaces to train staff on legal issues, especially intellectual property. It is important to note that the staff are young and untrained, and are not used to reading policies or guidelines especially if they are lengthy and very formal. For this reason, conducting face-to-face talks of a maximum of one hour, for specific topics, is very effective in achieving rapprochement and clarifying doubts.

What are some of the most significant cases and transactions you have been involved in recently?

Being a legal department that provides assistance to group companies at the Latin American level, interesting cases frequently arise that must be resolved depending on the country of origin. However, I believe that the most important cases have been in relation to the acquisition or merger of foreign companies with our Costa Rican companies. Uniting companies from different jurisdictions is an important challenge since due diligence cannot be carried out in a similar way and in this sense, the contribution and recommendations of external advisors are very transcendental, both from the commercial and fiscal point of view.