Team size: Seven

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

Recently, I have invested considerable time in advocacy related activities, including collaborating with working groups and industry associations to discuss the Brazilian tax reform, and changes to the Brazilian civil code and companies law.

My team and I have also focused more attention on internal affairs. Brazil’s new transfer pricing and tax rules for investment funds and offshore vehicles had a big impact on our business, which translated into a lot of work to rethink our structure in Brazil and abroad from a business and tax perspective.

We are also enhancing our quality controls to track the performance of our external advisers. We hope to be able to track not only the quality of their work, but the value added by such firms to our ecosystem.

What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?

The alternative investments industry is broad and fun. I believe a unique quality to succeed in this industry is having the intellectual curiosity of the ‘renaissance people’, as Aswath Damodaran likes to mention. The habit of constant development and search for knowledge is key to becoming a great advisor to investors, as well as to developing phronesis, which is a common trait among great advisors.

How have you fostered a closer collaboration between the legal department and your business counterparts?

By working with them as business partners. Legal and compliance are both support teams, meaning our prime objective is to support the business and enable them to unlock value.

We include our business counterparts in our discussions and explain our concerns, making them part of the solution. We are responsible risk takers, and we work together with our business counterparts to make sure all our investments have a sufficient margin of safety and are in compliance with applicable rules and regulations.

Do you have a cause, business-related or otherwise, that you are passionate about?

I am passionate about public policies and ethical conundrums in the financial markets, and how all that affects the market and the players decision making process.