About

Legal manager Ignacio Liberman Yaconi has an extensive knowledge of Chile’s national postal service, Correos de Chile (also known as CorreosChile), having first joined the state company in 1999. After a brief period between 2006 and 2008 when he was invited to join a team of professionals in the Ministry of Public Works, whose mission was to explore the alternatives to meet the growing demand for a regulatory body of the concessions of public works, Liberman re-joined CorreosChile. He took on the position as a corporate lawyer before being promoted to deputy legal manager and then his current position in 2012 and 2015 respectively. He is commended for demonstrating an extreme commitment to understanding the business and had to the following to share about the lengths he went to and his reasons for doing so: ‘I walked with postmen, I travelled the route with transporters, I classified packages and letters in the plants, I visited distribution centres and branches, I understood the particularities of air and land transport. This obsession to know the business, has allowed me to approach with a comprehensive and pragmatic view the legal issues of our company, making sure that, the contract, litigation, problem or issue is resolved by looking at the benefit of the business’. Liberman also fully comprehends the company’s mission and what impact this has on the legal function. Identifying the company’s mandate as being efficient and self-financing as well as fulfilling the crucial public function of reaching inhabitants of remote places, he says, the following: ‘understanding the importance of the company’s mission is a real engine to lead the great challenges that are imposed on the legal team, especially when the nature of the company coexists with various regulatory frameworks. This forces us to know, study and attend dissimilar legal specialties, many of them only binding to the postal services provided by Correos de Chile’. Since taking his current role, Liberman is credited for establishing fundamental pillars within the legal function to ensure the company receives the best-in-class legal service. As a result of this he’s been able to guide the function on a number of important developments such as a major collective bargaining process, disputes concerning competition matters and negotiation processes worth over US$10m. Liberman is also conscious of the ‘explosion of digital development’ and is well placed to guide CorreosChile in this ever-changing field. He states: ‘the postal market has an ambiguous, unresolved regulation and actors that compete intensely for market share. This means continuously confronting administrative and judicial actions of competitors who seek to reduce the space of the main market company. Thus, in recent years, we have participated in important processes in matters of free competition, having to lead the teams in charge of each of the defences’.