Colgate-Palmolive Central America – GC Powerlist
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Central America Teams 2019

Consumer products

Colgate-Palmolive Central America

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Central America Teams 2019

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About

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured, highlighting key individuals and their role within the department?

We are divided by the functions we are providing support to and by countries. For example, Maria del Rosario provides support to finance and human resources in Costa Rica and Panama. Mayrim Cardona supports marketing, customer service, and supply chain in Guetemala, El Salvador and Honduras, Nicaragua, always under my supervision. Personally, I deal with the leadership team, all functions, all countries, and customer development issues. Maria del Rosario Gonzalez and I have worked together for 11 years and she is key to this legal department. She is bright and creative. She is my right hand and she can assume any additional responsibility when I am out of the office.

What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has been involved with in the last two years?

We have worked on various trade dress infraction cases where we had the defendant change the packaging of its complete portfolio of products. For this work we won several of ‘The Chairman’s You Can Make the Difference’ awards, and we were nominated for the global award. We have also been working on very complex collection cases involving millions of dollars. Finally, we are very active in the area of brand protection (which involves counterfeit products) and we had the opportunity in one of our cases to shut down a large counterfeiting toothbrush plant in China. For this we also won a ‘The Chairman’s You Can Make the Difference’ award.

How does the team ensure a quick turnaround time when working on activities?

What defines our department is teamwork, relentlessness, creativity, and toughness. We never give up, we always work as a team and support each other, we never freeze in the face of adversity and we are creative; we always find a way to sort things out. This is how we always get a quick turnaround or at least we always complete our objectives.

Can you describe some of the challenges your team faces by working for an American multinational consumer in the Central American market?

I wouldn’t describe them as challenges but as a US multinational we play at a different level or playing field as other companies. We have a different way of doing business, not only from a legal standpoint, but also from an ethical point of view. We have to comply with the FCPA, competition laws, anti-boycott laws, Sarbanes-Oxley, but also we are a highly ethical company that abides by its code of conduct, business practices guidelines, and commercial principles. We will never do or engage in activities that other companies do in order to achieve certain goals.

Focus on… outside counsel

One important challenge that in-house lawyers have to face is the selection and evaluation of the outside legal service providers. In Central America, this has proven to be a challenge since the landscape has been changing constantly over the last 10 years. It used to be that the discussion ranged between the traditional large all-purpose versus boutique firms. Over the last 10 years, the traditional law firms have been disappearing or shifting to something different. The problem is that these concepts might work like a charm for the outside service providers but to the in-house lawyer several important attributes may have been sacrificed in the process. We miss the ‘compromise’ and the contact with some of the older or more seasoned members of such lawyers. Teamwork is missing in some cases. I am not saying the quality of service has suffered because that is not the case in many of these new types of law firms. However, the attention at the personal level has switched to include a wide variety of new characters that have no connection to your company or even your brands. More work over e-mails, Whatsapp, and other communication tools, and fewer phone calls. Personally, I still believe that when planning a strategy or drafting outlines of documents or due diligence lists, there is no substitute for a good old fashioned conference call or video conference call or the like. In a world that moves extremely fast and in a business that is implementing production line practices it becomes easier to have a conversation via Whatsapp than to schedule a meeting. Of course this has its benefits as well, it is sometimes easier to locate an outside counsel in an emergency via one of these communication apps than it is to call them when they are in a meeting. However, as the client you start missing those things. Call me old fashioned but when I am interviewing outside counsel these are some of the questions that I still ask. However, you have to move with the times and look to adapt to new models at least within my region. When looking to hire or assign a particular case to a law firm in-house counsel has to decide on which of these new models will suit better to the case or the company, and how to deal with new types of relationship. It is certainly not as easy as it looks. When you have been doing this for as long as I have, you have your style and you way of doing things which may seem weird to the new lawyers that will work with you for the first time and will probably only do a couple with you and then move to something different. In the extremely large law firms now, many of these young lawyers change law firms, go to study abroad and chances are they don’t come back to work at the same place. This means that when you are assigned a new associate to work with you, you have to start all over again. Then the engagement and the trust is lost. Of course I understand that this is not only the result of the new models but also of the resources we have to assign to a particular matter. So will we ever see the traditional all-purpose law firm or the boutique? The answer is I don’t know. We will have to continue to adapt to the new ways of running legal services and try to make the best of it. In any case the only constant in the world will always be change. My advice to outside service providers would still have to be that growing in size and capabilities doesn’t necessarily have to mean losing all the things that made that relationship between in-houses and outside counsel great.

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