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The legal team at the core of the mobile and messaging services company Zenvia has recently undergone several transformational changes. According to general counsel Pedro Flach, ‘over the last two years the team has been reorganised in both structure and activities. Lawyers have been trained to understand other areas of the business and decision making best practices’. As a result, the team is now said to possess strong knowledge of the workings of Zenvia’s business and be able to provide fast and assertive responses to the demands of its internal clients. ‘Legal has been working in a proactive manner to develop and maintain the cultural change of the company,’ Flach says. ‘As an example, legal has learned techniques that were used in other areas of the company, such as agile development of software, and started working in the same manner as its internal clients would work, in order to better understand their realities and necessities. After that, legal started training other areas of the business about these agile techniques for managing activities’. Recently, Zenvia’s legal department conducted an assessment that resulted in a significant reduction in risk that had previously cost the company nearly 10% of its gross operational income. ‘Legal conducted the risk assessment, the plans for mitigating risks and the negotiations necessary for extinguishing the total risks,’ Flach states. ‘The process was entirely driven by the internal team and the result was a 95% reduction of the total risks involved. In addition the leaders and senior management were trained to identify potential issues and immediately act to prevent them’. Besides its leader, the team includes three highly experienced legal professionals- Amarilis Sehbe, Juliano Mirapalheta and Bernardo Malta.