Florida Ice and Farm Company (FIFCO) – GC Powerlist
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Central America Teams 2019

Florida Ice and Farm Company (FIFCO)

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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?

The FIFCO legal department for our Central American operations consists of a general counsel, three legal managers, and five senior and junior counsel. The general counsel reports directly to the company’s CEO and plays a key role in the senior leadership team, which defines the strategy of the company. The way the team is structured follows both our notion that all our tasks can be categorised as transactional, operational or strategic; and our leadership model which encourages collaborative thinking, boosts interpersonal and intrapersonal skills and promotes learning and exploration as a means to create innovative solutions. The entire team deserves to be highlighted as an immensely capable and high-functioning unit, operating harmoniously and fluidly within these functional task levels.

Our legal managers are: David Sequeira, who is in charge of the regional food and beverages division; Andrea Solís, responsible for the back office, corporate legal compliance and retail business unit, and Fabián Fernández, who oversees the hospitality and real estate development, and also serves as the division’s financial manager; and

Our counsels are: Johanna González, chiefly involved in data protection, IT, and sweepstakes and consumer regulations; Priscilla Vargas, focused mainly on legal corporate compliance and human resources; Milena Pacheco, providing advice to our retail business unit and public relations matters; Isaac Salazar, specialised in supply chain and contract management, and José Rodríguez, commercial liaison for the food and beverages division.

The legal department plays a key role within the different business decision-making forums within the corporation, and its business sense is often subject to praise.

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

During the last two years, there are four main cases/transactions to highlight: First, the execution and design of the contract structure with key partners, that enabled the technological transformation of the company; Second, securing relevant commercial opportunities through investment and contracts, that directly impact the top line of the company; Three, defined and executed a strategy that resulted in a material reduction of company’s tax contingencies; and lastly, the closure of two extremely complex transactions that have re-shaped the focus of our hospitality and real estate business unit.

1. FIFCO’s shift towards digital platforms and a customer-centric vision have thrust into the limelight our technology-forward mind-set. The subscription of highly specialised cloud services represented a departure from the company’s vision regarding infrastructure, software management, and the deployment of mobile and other platform environments. These transactions truly showcased our Legal team’s ability to acquire and process new information, and a comprehensive role in all negotiation and implementation stages.

2. Furthermore, as true business-driven lawyers, the team has participated in several key commercial opportunities, which are at the core of the company’s strategy. In doing so, we have cemented several relations that strengthened the top line of the business, as well as opening-up to new jurisdictions, diversifying our product base to trending categories, and continuing to prove FIFCO is a powerful ally and a distinguished player in the market.

3. A major strategic shift in the way we were addressing tax litigation led to a material reduction of the company’s contingencies, which is definitely worth highlighting. The entire proposal was carefully thought-out and executed with deft precision; balancing technical expertise, risk management and transparency -ultimately delivering a win-win situation in a seemingly impossible scenario.

4. Also worthy of note was our involvement in the construction, procurement and operational contracts for a new high-end hotel within our Reserva Conchal property. The entire project was held to the highest standards and earned the distinction of being one of Marriot-Starwood’s flagships: ‘The W Costa Rica’. This project, along with the sale of a concession parcel within the ‘Polo Turístico Papagayo’, are two extremely complex transactions that have re-shaped the focus of our hospitality and real estate business unit.

What recent political, economic or regulatory changes in Central America have impacted your company and the team the most?

In the case of Costa Rica – our core market – the economic context of recent years generates a challenging outlook for business in general. The recent stiffening of our competition law, data protection regulations, fiscal and transparency policies are also issues that impact businesses. Most of these regulatory changes have come on the heels of the country’s decision to join OEDC; which has set a higher bar in several regulations, but in itself is a very positive sign of the country’s willingness to hold itself to the highest standards. Also, ever-changing consumer preferences inevitably lead us to believe upcoming regulatory changes regarding plastic, sugar and alcohol will be a factor in the near future. All the above issues are key to determining the way in which the legal team provide added value to the business through sound advice and accompaniment.

What are the key challenges the team faces when working on key food and beverage projects?

We have found each food and beverage project presents itself with unique challenges. Focusing on innovative or disruptive products – cannabis infused beverages come to mind – for example, is a prime opportunity for an exercise in risk management. A relatively new, scarcely regulated category and the need to act with agility to respond to the business need of capturing a specific timeframe, all must be carefully weighed against each other in order to provide adequate, sound advice.

These are common challenges to the fast-moving consumer goods industry that are a reflection of change on a broader scale. One could trace a line between fleeting consumer preferences, harsher regulation, and environmental concerns, for example. The transformation in commercial and consumer relations that has been brought upon by digital technologies and data proliferation in general, demonstrates the broad spaces where the law is still yet to provide adequate answers.

What ‘legal tech’ products does the team utilise? What is useful about the products and could they be improved?

This is a topic that is close to our heart. While researching and testing a significant portion of the ‘legal tech’ products out there, we came to a simple conclusion. Our needs were best served leveraging our company’s investment in technological platforms, and customising existing out-of-the-box software hand-in-hand with our IT Department. This approach has ensured a true ‘customer centric’ solution, as we are both the customer and the architect to the platform, as well as almost immediate support, on top of allowing our expenses to be kept in check.

The concept behind the platform was to allow a large majority of our transactional tasks to be executed directly and immediately by our internal clients. This ‘self-service system’ stemmed from a deep introspective understanding of our process, and has allowed our team to concentrate on more strategic processes – truly delivering added value. While the platform has been online ever since 2012, it has been revamped in 2015 and again this year, and we still consider it is at an early-development stage, as we continue to expand and improve its reach, trying to impact new areas and processes of the company with a simpler, user friendly, and self-driven vision.

The true challenge behind our platform has not been technological restraints, costs or time invested, but rather change management. At the end of the day, the human factor in all of us tends to outweigh other considerations; with trust being a key factor.

How significant is collaboration within the legal team and how does that improve output?

Collaboration is an essential part to the company’s ethos, and is embodied in our leadership model. It is based on five simple pillars, that follow a specific order: unleashing the individual potential or essence of each of our leaders and workers; fostering meaningful relationships among others to enrich diverse thinking and be collaborative; exploring and learning – through trial and error – to promote innovation, and finally, the call to action that will be driven by honouring our commitments. All these balanced by a fifth centre pillar of harmony and enjoyment. This model has impacted the way we take decisions, implement our processes and how we gauge our performance.

Today, the legal team is a department where skills can be pooled to make a project more successful than it otherwise would have been. The current collaboration and respect that each member recognises in the other has naturally cultivated a sense of community, like feeling part of the family. This generates trust and teamwork that can exceed expectations far beyond what is assigned to them as part of their specific role, leading to informed and agreed upon decisions.

Focus on… path to becoming an in-house counsel

There is a transformation that needs to occur within every lawyer on their path to become an in-house counsel. As a matter of fact, that is why I very much prefer to use the term ‘counsel’ rather than ‘lawyer’ when referring to in-house counsel. To be successful, one must be able to deliver value that exceeds legal expertise. In fact, we believe soft skills, thorough knowledge of the organisation and overall market is paramount, and can often displace dominium over legal technicalities in importance. Organisations are very much living, morphing social entities; that respond to shared needs, opportunities and ideals. Learning to navigate this reality, and to coherently advise in a way that allows the organisation to follow its business vision, while balancing legal intricacies and risk management, all while caring for personal relations, can very much be a new paradigm for a lawyer. This business acumen can be thought of as a new set of values that intersects traditional regulation, and as such, must be acknowledged, and indeed harnessed by the in-house counsel. While fostering the relation with key outside law firms and experts is a priority for most organisations, at the end of the day, the general counsel plays a particular role as the go-to advisors for board members, CEOs, other senior management, and often weigh in on public policies, laws and regulations. Undoubtedly, the broader knowledge and skill base that a general counsel builds through their tenure as a lawyer and business partner, is a key factor that stands out in leadership discussions of the highest order.

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