What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

As our department is involved not only on deal negotiations, but also responsible for corporate and government engagements, there has been a lot of different initiatives where CELA (corporate external and legal affairs) Brazil team has played a very significant role.

Two of these can be found detailed below:

B3 Deal: Supporting business on the execution of a 10-year strategic partnership with B3 where MSFT will be its cloud provider to all their line of business and legacy modernisation. The deal also involved a technical partnership with Oracle.

This strategic partnership is the first one that B3 is sealing with a Hyperscalers that is in line with their strategy to be a technology company that provide financial services to help and involve Brazilian Capital Market.

Microsoft Legal Department has provided legal support for a couple of projects within the public sector organisation, during the pandemic times and even afterwards, to provide solutions to the public administration, for a due capacity, technology, and structure to provide public services to citizens. Vacina Já is an amazing example of an application for control, information and other relevant topics regarding Covid-19 vaccination.

Microsoft Brazil legal has been strongly engaged with public administration in different sort of relationships, cooperating with development, strategy, and digital transformation of government. An important regulatory, policies, and procurement rules has been played by the local legal team.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?

It is fundamental. Not only do we need law firms to understand about our business in the technology sector, and be flexible about fee arrangements, but we count on them for responding with high quality and in due time. But on top of that, for Microsoft and for me as well, working with firms that share our values of respect for the individual, focus on learning constantly and having an open mindset, having the expected accountability and honesty in doing business with high ethical standards is key. We select the lawyers who work with us very carefully, as we believe this is a relationship of full trust. Thus, we have built long lasting and successful partnership with lawyers from different areas of law throughout decades and we care deeply about those, as we tend to follow them even when they change firms and when they do, as expected, they choose firms aligned with their and our values.

As we live in a fast-paced world today, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

First of all, the basic attributes of integrity and commitment I do not even classify as skill, as for me those are the foundational attributes expected from every professional.

But I would like to highlight that more than the technical skills, for example, having experience on a certain field of law, or having worked on a certain industry, soft skills are the ones that makes a real difference. Intelligent people will learn, and we are having to learn new things every day, including digital skills.

This is why I call the “soft skills,” “essential skills.” Among them, I would call out: authenticity, adaptability/flexibility; resilience; effective communication, creativity; self-confidence; collaboration, and courage.

Being genuine and authentic is something we still lack in corporations, and when you find authentic leaders, it is a blessing. But it does not matter where you are in the chain, being authentic guarantees, you earn credibility and there is nothing better than being able to be who you are, where you work. In a world that is changing so fast, one has to adapt and be flexible and open to the new. Keep your essence but be ready for making small adjustments whenever needed.

Resilience is for me the ability to resist, not give up, persist: a sign of grit. Very valuable in an accelerated world that requires always more from us.

Communication is 80% of leadership. With this saying from Bill Gates, which I heard in an internal Summit decades ago, I was convinced that this is one of the abilities (verbal and writing) that we need to keep mastering. Clarity is key and the way you convey an argument, message, idea – specially for us lawyers negotiating all the time – can be the different between success and failure.