Team size: 75

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

The legal team has served as a strategic pillar for the continuous expansion and innovation of Mercado Livre across Latin America. Over the past year, our primary focus has been on two crucial vectors that directly impact the company’s regional leadership.

Firstly, we have been deeply involved in the launch of new services that solidify the company’s position as a complete e-commerce and financial services ecosystem. This required essential legal support to structure and mitigate risks associated with groundbreaking marketplace, fintech and logistics products, ensuring the company can successfully navigate the complex, and often pioneering, regulations of various regional markets. This scope of work ranges from regulatory compliance and data governance to intellectual property protection and the management of new contractual relationships with strategic partners. Our goal is not just compliance, but enabling innovation at speed and scale across the region.

Secondly, we have successfully concluded two significant Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) transactions that are vital for the company’s sustained growth and strategic entry into new, high-potential markets. The legal team’s involvement was comprehensive, coordinating complex cross-border due diligence processes and structuring the agreements to ensure not only legal compliance but also the seamless integration of acquired assets and teams. These transactions, which are aimed at advancing our presence in high-growth segments, demanded a holistic legal vision, exceptional project management, and a strong focus on generating long-term shareholder value, thereby positioning the company for the next phase of its regional evolution.

What strategies has your legal team adopted to manage disputes and mitigate risks in Brazil’s dynamic business environment?

To address the inherent complexity and volume of the Brazilian regulatory and tax environment, the legal department has adopted a proactive, data-driven approach, leveraging artificial intelligence as a strategic differentiator in dispute management and risk mitigation. We successfully created and implemented an updated database containing over 85,000 active tax proceedings. This massive volume of information is managed and analysed through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools to assess potential financial impacts and extract predictive insights. This technology is not merely limited to monitoring liabilities; it is fundamental for real-time risk mitigation and for the identification of significant tax optimisation opportunities.

In 2025, the application of these advanced analytical tools enabled us to discover, validate, and successfully apply novel tax legal theories (teses tributárias) applicable to our business model. Consequently, we have actively initiated new judicial and administrative claims. This strategy is centered not just on defense, but on achieving fiscal efficiency, effectively transforming litigation from an inevitable operational cost into a mechanism for value creation for the company. The capability to process, analyse, and act upon 85,000 cases with high precision and speed places our team at the forefront of risk and dispute management in Brazil.