What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

Over the course of the last couple of years we have had the opportunity to work in different cases, transactions and projects, some of which we highlight below:

Trade remedies/antidumping cases before the Dominican Trade Defense Commission. These cases were related to corrugated steel bars imports from Turkey, China, and most recently, Costa Rica.

A very successful acquisition/purchase of shares transaction between the two former partners of the company, and other related matters which included handling the legal aspects of the change in the company’s corporate name and bylaws, new intellectual property registration, rebranding, notification to public entities, clients, suppliers and other business associates, and so on.

Financing transactions. From project financing for the construction, installation and start-up of the necessary equipment and machinery for our production lines, to working capital facilities, debt restructuring, refinancing and derivatives, we have engaged in the negotiation and closing of quite a few financing transactions relevant to our business, and that were key to ensuring our ability to stay competitive, to innovate and to quickly adapt to the market and meet our clients’ needs.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

We have always strived to stay up-to-date with the best legal practices in our industry, and this approach has been key in navigating through periods of instability and crisis for our company. We make sure to have in place legal structures and systems that protect our most sensitive interests and that allow us to guarantee the continuation of our business in almost every possible scenario or market situation, economic, legal, or otherwise.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

AI is definitely a trend that we all should be keeping an eye on. This technology is evolving very fast, and with this growth, come new challenges for legal systems around the world: intellectual property and copy rights, plagiarism, identity theft and many more. On the other hand, AI has become a very important tool for us lawyers, helping us analysing documents and data much faster than ever before.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?

Some of these factors include the level of legal expertise necessary to handle certain particular cases that require a sophisticated legal strategy and a very particular knowledge in a specific legal field, in order to handle them successfully, the workload handled by our department at a certain moment in time, of course and legal fees versus budget control. To evaluate external legal services we take into account the level of availability, time of response, the degree of expertise in certain areas, the cordiality of the team, and so forth.