About

Andrés Cedrón joined Michigan-based Fortune 500 medical technologies company Stryker Corporation in 2010 as its first dedicated Latin America legal specialist. He now heads the legal and compliance teams responsible for Stryker’s Latin America and Canada businesses, acts as legal director for its Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa divisions, and sits as part of the global legal leadership team. Overseeing teams across such a wide geographical area in a highly regulated industry can be challenging, but Cedrón says it has allowed him to rethink the way legal services are provided. As a result, he has spent the last two years introducing a shared services model to allow each of Stryker’s regional teams to scale up quickly by drawing on the expertise and resources of other lawyers across the company. A further advantage of this approach, says Cedrón, is that it helps regional counsel to isolate the truly local aspects of a matter and act as translators across different cultures. This, he says, has been particularly useful in the Latin America region, where a constantly shifting set of political and economic issues has made translation particularly useful. In Cedrón’s words, ‘we [in the legal team] are “tropicalisers” who take a US business model to Latin America and modify it to suit the local circumstances. It’s a region where personal relations matter a great deal and where an understanding of local cultures and practices can help business make better decisions’. Before joining Stryker, Cedrón spent a number of years in private practice as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York and Hunton & Williams in Miami. In both roles he specialised in Latin America-based matters, covering everything from sovereign transactions and capital markets to project finance and M&A.