Features

When Oscar Arroyo joined The Central America Bottling Corp. in 1988, the Guatemalan company was known for bottling Pepsi. It’d been working with the soda giant since the 1940s and business was good. However, the newly appointed CEO and the new chairman of the board knew CBC needed to expand beyond its home country if […]

While the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 did much to incentivize and encourage cross-border commerce among the United States, Canada and Mexico, inequities persisted. This was especially true on the labor front, with trade imbalances stemming from Mexican workers being paid significantly less than their counterparts to the north. Subsequent arrangements, including the […]

There was a time when Olga Victoria Prieto Zamora believed that motion was the potion to professional growth. So the young lawyer would spend a few years each with Latin American law firms or companies, then moved on, eager to apply her learnings elsewhere and garner new insight. But she seems to have settled down […]

Don’t tell Obedi Neves that he’s “technically retired.” The legal director for Brazilian-based Makro has been plenty busy. He and his staff not only helped his company become more profitable during a pandemic, but he also wrote an e-book and established a new training company for attorneys. With more than 30 years of experience working […]

Growing up in Mexico City, Oscar Ortiz says his life could’ve taken many unexpected turns, but a close-knit family helped—especially his grandfather Antonio, who stepped in as a father figure. Ortiz remembers learning life lessons as he handed wrenches to his grandad, an auto mechanic. Sadly, however, he also remembers his grandfather saying that in […]

If he were explaining his niche financial specialty—clearing—to his parents, Owen Taylor would do it like this: “Think of a clearing house like a buffer for the financial markets,” he says. “Banks, rather than interacting with each other, use a clearing house so that if one of them fails, there isn’t a domino rally that […]

She’s focused her career on trade compliance, and what an evolving subject that’s been. Evolving enough when it just involved movement of physical goods, as it mostly did when Orisia K. Gammell started as an associate at a high-powered law firm in Washington, D.C. How much higher the stakes can be as the global economy […]

In the legal world, negotiating and approving contracts can be much the same whether the contract is for widgets or human services. What the contract accomplishes, however, makes a big difference. The former seals deals, the latter can save lives, and it is the latter that has made Adam Lancer’s work more meaningful to him […]

No one need remind Oyango A. Snell of the sensitive nature of his employer, headquartered in the bluest of states. For common ground can be hard to find between the Western States Petroleum Association and the legislative and regulatory bodies in California, as well as the four other states where WSPA has a presence: Arizona, […]

Like the literal universe, the cosmos of intellectual property is expanding, only there’s still plenty of room for collision as companies jockey to acquire, manage and protect intellectual property. So it pays to get guidance both on a legal and science front. That’s a rare two-fer, but for the past three years a slew of […]