About

Ramon Rivera leads the Latin America legal function at research-based pharmaceutical company AbbVie, overseeing a team of senior legal counsel located in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and Guatemala. Under Rivera’s leadership, the team supports all countries in Latin America and the Caribbean – a $1bn sales area with close to 2,000 employees – on a broad range of matters including commercial litigation, intellectual property, distribution agreements, supply chain issues, labour and employment and corporate and transactional work. In addition to his Latin America responsibilities, Rivera provides guidance to AbbVie’s president of international markets (covering Latin America, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Japan and Asia Pacific) and gives strategic and legal risk advice to a range of senior business leaders across a number of functions. He has led several global legal initiatives and works closely with the ethics and compliance and global trade compliance departments. Before taking on the role of Latin America area legal counsel in late 2016 Rivera served as AbbVie’s ethics and compliance director for the region, a role in which he co-presented updates to the company’s chief executive and the entire senior executive team on AbbVie’s international compliance programme. During his two years as Latin America ethics and compliance director, AbbVie earned the highest category of compliance audit results in all countries in the Latin America region. The region also earned the highest recognition for the most impactful, innovative, and cross-functional compliance programs in AbbVie’s internal global compliance competition. Rivera began his career with AbbVie in 2011 as divisional counsel, in which role he led and co-led a number of significant projects including structuring the sale of a business unit to Abbott Laboratories for $5.3bn – a matter which required him to protect AbbVie’s pharmaceutical assets and sites in Europe, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Australia and saw him receive the AbbVie Significant Achievement Award – helping to lead AbbVie’s global IP strategy as part of a cross-functional team and leading internal and external counsel on Abbott Laboratories’ spin-off of AbbVie Inc. In his time with AbbVie he has been awarded a number of honours, including the president’s award three times, most recently in 2016 in recognition of his ethics and compliance leadership, the AbbVie significant achievement award three times, and, in 2013, the Abbott chairman of the board and chief executive officer recognition. In 2016 he was placed on the AbbVie director development programme, which is restricted to the top performing global directors in the company. Before moving in-house he held positions at the law firms DLA Piper (2007-2011) and Jenner & Block (2005-2007) and at Ernst & Young (1999-2005). Rivera holds a number of positions externally and is a member of the American Bar Association, the Illinois State Bar Association and the Hispanic Lawyers Association of Illinois. He has been a guest lecturer at the DePaul University School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems and has published research in the Journal of Taxation of Global Transactions.