About

Currently serving as the chief legal and institutional relations officer at CPFL Energia, Brazil’s largest private company in the power sector, operating in generation, transmission and distribution, Luiz Eduardo F. do Amaral Osorio is one of the most experienced and respected in-house lawyers in the country. Osorio’s role sees him acting in both a legal and commercial role; he is accountable not just for the management of the legal team, but also the ‘corporate internal and external communications, handling complex themes on branding, external relations with key stakeholders, especially government and regulators, sustainability and social investment’. In a career that has spanned multinational companies such as AmBev, Shell and Diageo, Osorio has built up an impressive talent for the management of legal and government affairs, truly understanding the commercial role that an in-house lawyer has to play in today’s business world. As Osorio says: ‘The General Counsel position has generally undergone a significant expansion of responsibilities in the last years, encompassing areas far beyond legal. I envisage the GC becoming more and more strategic and close to the CEO, the boards and its committees. The GC will increasingly dive into corporate governance and executive remuneration matters, and “softer” issues such as corporate reputation, ethics, sustainability, social performance and stakeholder relations’. This growth of roles has already happened for Osorio, who is a board member of CPFL Energias Renováveis S.A., the country’s largest renewable energies generation company, as well as vice-chairman of Instituto CPFL, the group’s investment arm for social, cultural and sports programs. Although his wide remit could have drawn his attention away from the legal team, which consists of 39 lawyers and 23 employees in a non-legal function, this has definitely not been the case. Since joining CPFL Energia in 2014, Osorio has undertaken a large-scale restructure of the department, which he terms the “Zero Base” legal transformation project (JBZ – “Jurídico Base Zero”). Restructuring of team members’ roles was needed for this, and the first iteration of it has ‘delivered savings in the order of millions of dollars through an ample restructuring of the legal organisation and processes and a focused settlement program. The “second wave”, strongly based on the identification of root causes, is already delivering on the reduction of incoming lawsuits; to the order of 33% case reduction since 2014’. In this time of change, Osorio was careful to maintain a focus on people development, ‘especially in the areas of leadership and management skills. It is rewarding to see the tangible improvement of staff morale in a relatively short period’. Even though the ‘highly regulated power sector has been through a very difficult business environment, pressed by various, critical regulatory issues in addition to an unstable socio-economic and political framework, which has led to a strongly legalistic landscape’, Osorio has managed to motivate his team as well as bring important operational changes to the company while also overseeing some landmark judgements and crucial M&A activity.