WorldCity Business Magazine

(3-b) The Lawyers' Club

by WC

Salvador Juncadella had recently retired after 25 years as in-house counsel for Exxon Latin America/Caribbean when he was having lunch with two friends at the Coral Gables restaurant, Le Festival. It was 1990. One was in-house counsel for Texaco Latin America and the other for American Express Latin America. Why dont we organize a group? one of them asked. I said, OK, lets have some lunches. So I called some people, Juncadella recalled recently from his offices at Morgan Lewis & Bockius, where he is now an attorney.

Today, what began as an informal gathering of a few in-house attorneys for multinationals based in the Miami area has outgrown the first few restaurants that played host. It includes 180 attorneys who are invited to gather every other month to eat lunch and compare notes. Normally, 40 to 45 attend. This, Juncadella said, is a traveling group. I have to be in Brazil. I have to be in Argentina. Thats why I write the memorandum after the lunches, recapping the discussion, to email to everyone.

There are no fees, outside the $35 cost of the lunch, and the only real requirement is that you be an in-house counsel, generally for a company doing business in Latin America or the Caribbean. While most are local to South Florida, the group includes members in Pittsburgh, Palo Alto, Calif., and Bentonville, Ark. But if you leave and go to work for a private law firm, youre out. There are two exceptions: Juncadella, the glue that holdsthe group together, and the managing partner of Morgan Lewis, Mark Zelek. Generally, at the lunch one member talks for 10-15 minutes about issues relative to his firm before more informal conversations.

Theyre begging to do it, Zelek said. But its not to get business. Its to share. In the last three months, the attorneys for Kraft Latin America, Caterpillar Latin America and Citibank Latin America have presented.

The rest of the time allows the attorneys to talk to each other about the issues of greatest interest to them. Every other year, the group puts on an all-day seminar, working with the University of Miamis Law School, tackling issues the members have identified as most important. Last year, the group was able to make a $5,000 donation for a scholarship. Theres an advisory committee, represented by MasterCard International, HBO, General Motors, Yahoo!, Motorola, Johnson & Johnson, LAN and Microsoft.

As with all multinationals in South Florida, sometimes promotions and transfers require that they relocate. Microsofts Horatio Gutierrez is now the chief lawyer for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, based in Paris, and worked on the Microsoft case with the European Union over monopolistic practices.

An attorney with the U.S. Southern Command, which is based in Doral and oversees U.S. military efforts in the Southern Hemisphere, was sent to Afghanistan to help establish legal parameters there. He is scheduled to speak at the June meeting. WC