© 2014 The Texas Lawbook.
By Natalie Posgate – (July 29) – Gardere Wynne Sewell has converted its Mexico City office, which started out as a joint venture entity between the firm and a group of Mexico City-based lawyers, into a wholly owned subsidiary of Gardere.
The joint venture was partially owned by Gardere and Mexico City-based Arena y Asociados SC. Gardere was one of the first U.S. law firms to open an office in Mexico when amendments in Mexican foreign investment laws first permitted firms to do so in 1992, said Steve Good, Gardere’s CEO and a partner in the firm’s Dallas office. Gardere formed the joint venture, or civil partnership, in 1996 with the partners of the predecessor firm to Arena y Asociados.
After this month’s transaction, Arena y Asociados no longer has separate legal operations from Gardere.
By converting the JV to a wholly owned subsidiary of Gardere, Good said the arrangement becomes “a much more efficient structure, with more regular communications and more coordinated business development and administrative practices.”
It also allows all legal issues in Mexico to be handled through one entity and a shared, common client base in the country.
Roberto Arena, formerly the managing partner of Arena y Asociados, is now the executive partner of Gardere’s Mexico City office and is a member of the firm’s board of directors.
In a statement, Arena said the combination is perfect timing because reforms in various sectors will cause Mexico to undergo, “from our perspective, a new era of economic development that will require increasingly sophisticated cross-border services of the sort our firm has provided in the legal market to top national and foreign clients.”
Industries getting reforms, he said, include energy, telecom labor and financial.
Since the 1996 inception, Gardere’s Mexico City office has expanded to a team of more than 20 attorneys, anchored by three partners in addition to Arena: Fernando Camarena, Marco Nájera and Daniel Aranda. The office specializes in antitrust, corporate and M&A, dispute resolution, energy, hospitality, insurance, international trade, real estate, finance procurement and tax law.
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