Juan Carlos Herrerra has left Ecuadorean firm Flor Bustamante Pizarro & Hurtado where he focused on energy and natural resources disputes to set up a boutique in Quito.
Herrera launched HvKN Dispute Resolution this month after six years at Flor Bustamante in Quito, where he was senior attorney. He will shortly name two associates who have also joined the firm.
The boutique’s initials stand for honour, vis (the Latin for “strength” or “force”), knowledge and neutrality.
He says the boutique was launched to meet a “growing need” in the market for “highly specialised, strategic dispute advice that is independent”.
Herrerra says that there is “increasing involvement of large law firms” in major transactions and projects in Ecuador and HvKN is able to act conflict-free and with full independence and strategic clarity.”
He says that HvKN is already advising a Chinese mining services company in a investment dispute with Ecuador.
The boutique is also acting for Ecuadorian company HP Drilling in a dispute with an Australian mining and oil services company; and in an M&A dispute under ICC rules between two Latin American pharmaceutical companies.
Lance Hubbard, founder of HP Drilling says Herrerra’s decision to establish a boutique “strikes us as a natural and strategic step”.
Herrerra also says the boutique will also advise on constitutional cases affecting energy and natural resources investors.
In 2023, he and Andrés Ycaza, who heads the mining practice at Flor Bustamante, helped Canada’s Dundee Precious Metals negotiate an investment protection agreement with the Ecuadorean government in relation to a copper and gold project.
Ycaza says Herrerra’s decision to form a boutique practice is “grounded in the experience he has gained in the energy sector and his deliberate choice to position himself in a specific segment of the dispute resolution market”.
During his time at Flor Bustamante, Herrerra founded the Ecuadorean Society of International Law and taught public international law at the Universidad de Las Américas in Quito.
Earlier in his career, he worked as a foreign lawyer at Lalive in Geneva and also led the legal department of the operator of the first metro line in Quito and worked as legal counsel a US food company Kellogg’s in the same city.
Written by: Jack Ballantyne
Originally published on: Global Arbitration Review