About

Gabriela Laufer’s legal career started at Shell Oil, where she worked on commercial law and was exposed to many international cases, which heightened her desire to become an international lawyer. With that in mind, after a few years of working with corporate litigation and restructuring, she obtained LLM degrees from the University of Cambridge, UK, and from New York University, an overseas endeavour that ultimately led her to land an associate position at the prestigious NY firm Shearman & Sterling. After some years working as a NY lawyer, she returned to the Rio de Janeiro in-house market, at public company Manabi. During her last year at Manabi and throughout a challenging reverse takeover of the company, Laufer was head of the legal team and its corporate secretary. She describes it as ‘an exciting task to coordinate the legal efforts of the company before a takeover counterparty as well as its stakeholders while also working as the corporate secretary during stimulating board of directors discussions. This experience vastly expanded my insight into governance, board dynamics and business negotiations and certainly made me a more rounded business lawyer’. Subsequently, she was invited to lead the legal department at Bravante, in January 2017, where she currently leads a reduced team of attorneys in a company that has close to 1,500 employees. She adds that, ‘by leading a small team through many tasks on different subjects, I daily direct my attention to diverse aspects of law (corporate, civil, tax, labour) and from the smallest chores to the most complex negotiations, making my days exciting and unique’. In addition, the company has four different business areas – offshore maritime support, port support, shipbuilding and environmental services – which, although related to oil and gas, all have completely different challenges. Laufer describes her management approach as follows, ‘I have always tried to bring the legal team closer to the operational teams as I feel that the closer we are, the more we can provide input on possible preventive actions and measures which may avoid future liabilities. I encourage the team to reach out directly to the business personnel of the company to get insight on the matters prior to simply answering an email or reviewing a contract. By knowing the background and fully understanding the needs of our internal clients, our analysis can be more focused and generally better’.