What do you see as the main points that differentiate Finocchio & Ustra from your competitors?

I believe that what sets our firm apart is our team, so much so that our purpose is: "To accomplish our mission in an ethical and collaborative environment that allows, with respect and transparency, the development of people."

In addition, we have always put all our energy into understanding and improving our client's business, which has culminated in the creation of a solid institutional culture that places the client at the center of our business - customer centricity - and this drives us to consistently deliver results through strategic, innovative, reliable, and effective solutions that clients can actually measure.

Finally, we believe that the corporate environment is undergoing an unprecedented restructuring phase, which requires all our efforts and intelligence to remain sustainably and perennially among the most prestigious firms.

Which practices do you see growing in the next 12 months? What are the drivers behind that?

For the next 12 months, we expect a relevant growth in M&A, international tax planning, and international contracts. The pandemic experienced in recent years has caused major geopolitical disruptions, which is undoubtedly already driving most companies to change their territorial strategies, impacting the areas mentioned above and other corporate areas relevantly.

What's the main change you've made in the firm that will benefit clients?

Continuous improvement is a mantra in our culture. In reviewing our strategic planning, we invariably focus on constant changes in people management, and marketing, especially customer centricity, innovation, and legal operations.

We have recently redesigned, via system, all our customer experience processes to enhance our clients' experience and ensure that our legal solutions, in whatever area the client interacts with, exceed their expectations. As you can imagine, this has significantly increased our client satisfaction indicators.

Furthermore, over the past two years, we have finalized implementing new management software in our firm in order to allow us to design our solutions in a much more assertive manner. The increasing use of innovation, especially data, provides our clients with more reliable indicators, effectiveness, and transparency in decision-making.

Is technology changing the way you interact with your clients, and the services you can provide them?

Today, innovation is embedded in most projects for the continuous improvement of our services. And technology, along with design thinking, play a crucial role in achieving results that exceed client expectations.. An example of this was the recent launch of our innovation platform Future in Us - https://www.futurein.us/ - which aims to overcome the traditional model of law practice facing the inevitable market revolution, that is, to build the future together with our clients.

As for the interaction with clients, we have put a lot of energy into delivering our solutions in a digitalized and direct way, with the recurrent use of the best practices of visual law. In addition, we have made great efforts to deliver legal reports to our clients adapted to how the corporate world measures its indicators as in a secure, assertive, direct, intuitive, and real-time manner.

Can you give us a practical example of how you have helped a client to add value to their business?

Recently, during a design thinking session with a client based in Europe, we identified that this client had great difficulty controlling its corporate obligations in Brazil. The process was done only internally and statically using spreadsheets from its local internal legal department. In addition, there was no effective control of its deliveries or a safe place for corporate documents to be filed.

Thus, with this need identified, we developed a cloud system that manages all corporate obligations on a single screen, allowing the client to have a complete corporate overview of its companies in Brazil. In addition, the system is constantly updated with legislative changes and informs the client, in advance, of all deadlines for submitting corporate obligations. The system also generates reports in an automated way and stores and manages, in a single database, all company information and corporate documents.

It is worth noting that today this system is the leader in the corporate records and document management market in Brazil and plans to expand to several South American countries since a large part of its clients are transnationals.

In addition, in an intimate relationship with technology, the firm has introduced a new tax ERP system capable of supplying fast data and information to all clients. The collection and presence of data are now much quicker than in the past few years. For instance, the new system and workflow use AI to analyze and classify judicial decisions, providing lawyers, attorneys, and counsels with a quicker response. Besides that, our firm developed a new, faster, and fairer way to calculate and bill contracts. Clients can now ask, at any time, for information on hours billed that they proportionally pay for according to the lawyers’ seniority and experience level. As a result, using technology to leverage our knowledge and having a hands-on team allows us to deliver complex and specific tax services to our clients within a fraction of the time our competitors do and in a much more assertive manner.

Are clients looking for stability and strategic direction from their law firms - where do you see the firm in three years’ time?

Our clients entirely drive us in everything we believe and do, so much so that it is in our vision: "To be a sustainable and enduring reference firm in a changing corporate environment." Thus, we find it essential to look at our vision on a daily basis and analyze, with great sincerity, whether we are making every effort to be ready for this changing world, whose protagonists are our clients.

Finally, in three years' time, we see our firm as the best environment for people to work in Brazil, with a team highly engaged in innovation and loyal clients delighted with strategic, innovative, reliable, and effective solutions. And among the top five most admired firms in the country.