About

Organisationally, the legal team at L’Oréal has undergone a significant change in recent months. A designated local legal team head dedicated to the Latin American Zone has been installed, reporting directly into the Zonal CEO. This shows that ‘the company believes legal to be as important as other support areas, acting as business partners and helping the business to obtain outstanding results’, according to Marisol González Ortega Roque, general counsel for the Hispano American Zone. The team has been heavily involved in improving the technological resources at their disposal in order to ‘be more efficient in their day-to-day activities’, including a ‘workflow system to review and approve new product claims’, showing an appetite to innovate and capture whatever is available to them to assist the business in its goals. The increased use of technology by employees of the company has also had a knock-on effect in terms of company transparency. This has resulted in the legal team having to take the lead in ‘developing certain guidelines regarding all digital/social media/bloggers’ usage’ of these platforms. This ‘ensure[s] people [know] how we work, with guidelines being applied globally and throughout the different divisions within the L’Oréal Group’. The legal team in Mexico supports the whole Hispano American Zone by coordinating certain operations and transactions regionally. In particular, the team was involved in the ‘analysis and coordination for the acquisition and expansion of a plant in Colombia’, along with the ‘negotiation and review of lease agreements for distribution centres and office spaces in Uruguay, Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile’, and provided ‘regional legal support in the internationalisation of two new brands in the Hispano American Zone’. Roque, along with Rafael Anaya, general counsel for Mexico, lead the Mexican-based team. González sums up the team’s ethos in a highly positive manner: they are ‘legal experts working as a team to strengthen the position of the business by helping achieve [its] goals and objectives… we make sure we understand the business and market needs by working as business partners and we leverage our diverse expertise and technical skills throughout the region’.