About

Formerly in private practice at The Legal 500 recommended Mattos Filho, Veiga Filho, Marrey Jr. e Quiroga Advogados for almost a decade, João Camarota decided to move in house when he realised that Brazil’s booming (pre-crisis) capital markets were converting him into an equity deals specialist and not a rounded capital markets lawyer. Joining Morgan Stanley as a vice president, he began to cover not just capital markets and investment banking but also derivatives agreements, fixed income matters, funds and other areas that ‘gave him a real opportunity to learn the business’. By his own account, this experience greatly facilitated his step up to regional general counsel in 2010. Since his arrival he has overseen the restructuring of the bank’s local business in Brazil but is most proud of having ‘built a relationship of trust, proximity and partnership’ with the company’s other business units. ‘They see us as a support, as facilitators now, even if on occasion we have to say no. If we refuse now it’s because the team as a whole has been unable to come up with an alternative way of making a matter function, not because “the legal department said no”’. He has come to see the role, certainly in the context of a financial institution, as a half-way house between private practice and the in-house function in a conventional commercial organization; ‘why? Because here in the bank one is surrounded by deal-doers’. Despite this he notes that ‘with the ramping-up of regulatory scrutiny hugely over the last few years, both locally and internationally, I find myself taken away from deals and increasingly taken up by non-profit making regulatory matters’. Nevertheless, he enjoys the bank’s ‘very healthy, open atmosphere, which fosters frank discussion’, and the increasingly strategic aspect of his role. On external counsel, he is critical of those firms that ‘lack the sense that the right answer might be “no” on occasions’, and is frustrated by their inability to maintain deadlines, ‘especially if they have imposed them themselves’, and the tardiness of billing procedures.