About

Bruno Damasceno, legal manager at Sulnorte Serviços Marítimos, is referred to by one source as ‘an excellent professional, with business-oriented vision and exceptional knowledge on tax litigation’. Across his career in private practice and in-house, Damasceno has been known as a lawyer able to get to the heart of issues, instead of getting caught up in legal technicality. Damasceno was hired to create the legal department for Sulnorte Serviços Marítimos, a tugboat company that is part of H. Dantos Group, the oldest Brazilian private shipping group. ‘My first act coordinating the legal department was to developed all the contracts, legal actions and regular expenses controls, before that they didn’t exist. We used to hire external lawyers for our legal actions, now we are starting to assume the legal accompaniment, reducing costs’, says Damasceno. The legal team that Damasceno has built has become responsible for an array of work, with particular achievements in ‘licencing, and all the negative certificates of federal, labour and social security debts, which were essential’ for key contracts. Having started his career as a private practice lawyer at Gouvea Vieira Advogados, when Damasceno moved in-house he quickly ‘developed a new sense of how a company runs, learned the real expectations of the CEO and the partners, revising my former impressions’ of the work that is done in-house. The Sulnorte Serviços Marítimos legal team now cover contracts, labour law, taxes, civil procedures, regulatory and environment law, supporting the company across a broad range of practice areas.