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

Dentsu is one of the largest global marketing and advertising agency networks in the world. In Brazil, Dentsu grew through several acquisitions, done in the past 10 years. One of my challenges when I joined two years ago, was to integrate and rationalise the legal entities to create more efficiency. To achieve this goal, we had to negotiate and anticipate earnouts to avoid any sellers’ disputes. This task was completed with success. One other interesting case is the mass hiring of almost 100 resources of an operation that was outsourced and that brought high labour and tax risk to the company. After risks were assessed, it was decided to create a wholly owned business unit to host this operation. This demanded high knowledge from several areas and direct collaboration with the business, finance and human resources, which has proven to be successful.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

In-house lawyers should be more straight forward, efficient and understand business needs. Looking into tools provided by legal tech and learning visual law helps. There are many tools to help lawyers to deliver faster and more visual opinions. Since I joined Dentsu, we have been delivering our litigation reports in a more structured manner and through dashboards we show our internal clients and leadership, who provide feedback on where we can improve and what we are doing wrong. Understanding the business, being straightforward, helping business to mitigate risks is one way to become a business partner. Lastly, in-house lawyers need to have a strategic approach to the business and ordinary tasks can be shifted to tools and platforms. It’s important to identify the right tool to automate and manage legal documents and making use of time to dedicate for more strategic matters.

In general, what would you like to see change about the external law firms you use? 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?

I would like to see many changes in external law firms. My main concerns when retaining external counsel is how they manage mental health issues, and for sure would like to see more diversity, specially within race and ethnicity spectrums. Law firms are usually known for work overload and that has a direct impact in the mental health of the resources. I would like to see the law firms have effective diversity, equity and inclusion policies and mental health programs.