Team size: Around 30.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

I have been leading the legal operations department for about a year and a half. Due to the profile of the legal operations unit, one of our main challenges is to maintain the litigation lifecycle/workflow working with stability and foreseeability, thus applying tech tools when necessary, to guarantee that financial statements get accurate and assertive and to provide immediate responsiveness to SOX compliance requirements. In this sense, we get confidence from the stakeholders, managing periods of instability or crisis within an informational ambience that is trustable and leads to decisions that are more diligent and adherent to business strategy.

What are the major cases or transactions you have been involved in recently?

I can quote two cases that I consider emblematic to the company.

Recently, as informed in the 20-F filed last week, the legal operations team led the suppression of a material weakness related to the litigation management, due to former fragilities in judicial deposits and contingencies. Should be noted that this material weakness was reported at the financial statements for more than a decade, during the oversight of more than one external auditor.

In my former position, as the head of the legal department, no doubt the major transaction I have led, from the legal standpoint, was the privatisation of the company, through one of the most important Brazilian capital market operations, both in capital raised as well as in legal complexity. União Federal (Eletrobras’ former controller) renounced its preference right to follow the capital raising, allowing investors to acquire shares and transform the company, from a state-owned to a corporation with pulverised political rights that cannot be exercised above a limit of 10%, even within a shareholder’s agreement.

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments?

Certainly, the use of AI to predict judicial behaviours in lawsuits, being from parties, judges or courts. Once the company has a sanitised database to apply this technology, it will help hugely in a variety of fronts, such as litigation prevention (increasing settlements rates and even litigations to start, by identifying its causes), litigation strategy, financial forecast of lawsuits (thus improving cash flow management), automatisation of procedural documents (according to judicial behaviours), and so on.