Commercial Track 02
Manage Legal Risk Across Latin America
Regional oversight
The problem is rarely the local lawyers.
It is that nobody owns the region.
Most U.S. companies operating in Latin America already have competent local counsel in each country. What they lack is a single accountable layer that directs that network, standardizes what it reports, and turns it into a view the General Counsel can take to the Board.
KNR USMCA supplies that layer. We work above your local firms, not instead of them — setting the standard they report against, auditing their performance and spend, and consolidating regional exposure into something legible to a U.S. corporate reader.
What this solves
Six symptoms of a
region nobody owns
Fragmented local counsel
A different firm in every country, each with its own reporting format, billing practice, and interpretation of what your corporate standard means. Nobody owns the regional picture.
No visibility into regional risk
You learn about exposure when it escalates, not when it forms. Local teams report what they were asked, in the format they prefer, on their own cadence.
Inconsistent reporting
Litigation, contracts, and compliance matters are tracked differently in each jurisdiction, so consolidating them into a board-ready view is a manual exercise every quarter.
Uncontrolled outside-counsel spend
Rates, scopes, and staffing vary widely across the region with no benchmark, and invoices arrive without a way to assess whether the work matched the need.
Weak post-acquisition integration
An acquired company keeps its own counsel, its own contract templates, and its own compliance habits — and the gap only surfaces during the first serious incident.
No regional legal leadership
Someone at headquarters is accountable for Latin America without the local fluency, the time zone, or the bandwidth to actually direct the work.
How we engage
Three ways to put
someone in charge
Outside General Counsel for Mexico
A permanent legal function for your Mexican operation without the cost and delay of building an in-house department — contracts, corporate housekeeping, labor, and regulatory change under one accountable relationship.
Ongoing counsel → Explore 02Regional Legal Director for LATAM
Embedded regional legal leadership: jurisdictional opinions, audits of local counsel performance, post-acquisition integration, and the consolidated risk view your Board expects to see.
Flagship engagement → Explore 03FCPA Compliance in Latin America
Anti-corruption diligence on third parties, controls that survive an internal audit, and investigation support when an allegation surfaces in a Latin American subsidiary.
Compliance → ExploreWhat you get
Outputs you can
take to the Board
The value of regional oversight is not more legal memoranda. It is a set of recurring outputs that let a General Counsel answer, at any moment, where the exposure is, who is handling it, and what it costs.
Request a regional risk review- A consolidated view of legal exposure across your Latin American jurisdictions
- Standardized reporting formats for litigation, contracts, and compliance matters
- Performance assessment of in-country legal teams and outside counsel
- Jurisdiction-specific legal opinions written for a U.S. corporate reader
- Anti-corruption controls aligned with FCPA and local anti-bribery regimes
- A post-acquisition legal integration plan for newly acquired entities
- Outside-counsel scope and spend review across the region
- Board-ready briefings that state risk in business terms, not legal ones
LATAM
Risk
Assessment
Answer six questions about your footprint and how legal work is currently handled in the region. One of our attorneys reviews your profile and sends back a preliminary read of where your exposure most likely sits.
No sales deck. A written response within two business days.
- 01 Your role & decision authority
- 02 Industry sector
- 03 LATAM jurisdictions with active exposure
- 04 Top legal priority for the next 12 months
- 05 Visibility into local legal teams
- 06 Operating model in the region
Common questions
Regional oversight,
answered
The questions General Counsels and Regional Legal Directors ask us most. For your specific footprint, a 30-minute call is the fastest path.
It covers the layer between your U.S. legal department and the local firms doing the work in each country: setting the standard those firms report against, reviewing their performance and spend, consolidating exposure into a single view, and translating what happens locally into terms a U.S. General Counsel and Board can act on. The local firms still execute the local work; the oversight layer makes it legible and comparable across jurisdictions.
Local firms answer the question you ask them, in their jurisdiction, in their format. That works for discrete matters and breaks down when you need a regional picture: nobody is accountable for consistency, comparability, or for telling you about a risk you did not know to ask about. Regional oversight adds a single accountable point that directs and audits that network rather than replacing it.
Three things in parallel: establish which legal obligations and liabilities actually transferred and which remain open; align the acquired entity to your corporate standards for contracting authority, compliance policies, and reporting; and assess the legal team and outside counsel you inherited before renewing anything by default. The window matters because integration decisions deferred past the first quarter tend to harden into permanent exceptions.
Third parties — customs brokers, permit facilitators, distributors, and local agents who interact with authorities on your behalf — are the most common source of FCPA exposure in the region. The approach is diligence before engagement, contractual controls and audit rights during it, and a documented review cadence that can withstand scrutiny after the fact. When an allegation does surface, the response has to be structured from the start to preserve privilege across two legal systems.
No. It extends it. The typical arrangement is that your in-house team keeps ownership of strategy and of the relationship with the business, and this engagement supplies the regional bandwidth, local fluency, and time-zone coverage the team does not have — including direct oversight of the local firms already doing the work.
Managing multiple jurisdictions?
See the Region
In One View
Tell us which countries you operate in and how legal work is currently handled there. We'll show you where the visibility gaps are.
Not ready to talk? Take the LATAM Risk Assessment