About

With approximately 45 employees reporting into her, Patricia Thomazelli focuses on institutional legal matters at Itaú Unibanco, the Brazilian banking group that has a wide range of financial operations across the Americas, Europe and Asia. In her role as head of corporate, intellectual property, contracts, real estate, and third sector teams within Itaú Unibanco’s legal function, Thomazelli ensures that several internal clients are serviced with expert legal advice, including the board of directors and its committees. Due to most legal work in the bank occurring internally, Thomazelli has developed a ‘high level of specialisation that has created a strong partnership with clients to streamline processes’ in these different legal fields. Examples of this work includes: the review of more than 2,000 contracts and documents each year; sophisticated corporate work owing to Itaú’s listing in the US, Brazil and Argentina; handling Central Bank of Brazil regulation and other regulatory institutional matters. Thomazelli also helps coordinate the corporate work across a number of institutional relationships and more than 80 companies. Several complex and important changes came out of the merger between Unibanco and Itaú in 2008, which created the current Itaú Unibanco entity. Thomazelli had the opportunity to ‘coordinate the different works and meetings to define the new structure of the teams within the legal department’, showing her deep company knowledge and integration. As well as the legal complexities of merging two banks, there was a level of difficulty attached to the subsequent integration of teams and systems. A ‘mixture of cultures’ were bought together after the merger, and the newly created teams needed to ‘integrate and connect with the company´s upcoming goals and perspectives’; this was a difficult task Thomazelli oversaw and called a ‘gratifying and a challenging process’. Thomazelli arrived at Itaú Unibanco having already proven her organisation skill and ability to manage change. Formerly the director of legal affairs for Brazil at Luxottica, Thomazelli was entrusted with assisting the migration from an almost 100% outsourced legal counsel model to one that aligned internal advice combined with selected external lawyer input. She was able to help build ‘a concise and well trained in-house team’ whilst streamlining it with relevant local compliance and tax teams, a development which improved results ‘in the consultancy work and in litigation control’.