About

Netshoes is a fast growing sporting goods e-commerce company that operate with a relatively compact legal department led by legal director Flávio Franco. Taking overall responsibility for all legal matters across the company’s Brazil, Argentina and Mexico operations, Franco leads a legal team of seven employees, five of whom are licenced attorneys. Franco describes Netshoes as a ‘dynamic company full of initiatives related to new technologies, new service features, innovative partnerships among other activities focused on a unique customer experience and sustainable corporate growth’. Franco and the rest of the legal team – which he built from scratch upon his arrival at the company – play an important role in delivering these projects, and are constantly battling what Franco calls a ‘disruptive and fast moving environment’. The most crucial element of Franco’s work is connected with ‘closeness to the business’, owing to the aforementioned peculiarities of the digital industry; the e-commerce world is ‘constantly changing and developing’, requiring flexible and timely advice. Having a career that is extremely varied in terms of in-house roles, Franco can point to experience in ‘software technology, international logistics, retail and, most recently, sports and fashion e-commerce’. Over the years, Franco has developed a personal mantra that defines legal as being a ‘rich source of information, acting as a valuable business partner in any given corporate organisation’. Stressing the importance of trust and value-adding, Franco is also keen that those two attributes are not ‘nice to have’ skills, but rather essential requirements for all employees within his team. Heavily involved in the industry outside his legal director role, Franco is the course coordinator and a visiting professor on Insper’s post-graduate qualification course for in-house lawyers looking to boost their business skills and better manage their legal departments, covering a wide range of interconnected topics.