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

Some of our most significant cases recently have included M&A transactions for some of the Cielo’s subsidiaries and affiliates, new licenses for the company, and product structuring. For example, the permitting of the social beneficiary of the “corona voucher” to spend this benefit in supermarkets, pharmacies, and other merchants (within a few days), helping the government to diminish lines of people to obtain physical cash at the Caixa Economica Federal agencies.

Did the pandemic lead to a lasting increase in the interaction your legal team has with the strategic plans of the company?

The pandemic led to various changes in our organisation, and it is true that legal team intensified its relationship with the strategic matters of the company. Due to the fact that our company is present in more than 5000 municipalities in Brazil, the legal department had to follow regulations in all municipalities the company has presence in, in order to determine how to conduct businesses in each of these places. This is one example how the pandemic impacted our daily activities, but we could nominate more: labour laws, contracts, regulatory analysis, and others.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most? Which have you found most useful in your legal team?

Legal teams will need to learn how to analyse data and extract the best out of it. Examples of what have aided us are predictive models, artificial intelligence, blockchain applicable to register, smart contracts, central bank digital currencies, and tokenisation.

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?

The legal profile is already changing in my view, and in some industries, this is occurring faster than others. The main ability of the legal professional, in my personal view, will be the capacity to transform data in useful information. Of course, technological knowledge is always welcome, however, the lawyer of the future will need to better understand how to use all available data transformed into information to drive better legal decisions. We have already partially walked these steps, but we are far from state of the art.