About

With more than 50 years of experience in the oil and gas industry, working in the areas of maritime support, port support, shipbuilding, ship repair and environmental protection, Bravante has consolidated its presence in all business segments in which it operates. Despite the small size of the legal team, Bravante’s three lawyers have each made a considerable impact to the company. Legal manager and head of the function Gabriela Laufer explains: ‘Considering we are such a small team in a company that has more than two thousand employees and four different business areas, there is a lot of work to be done. We all have many tasks do to everyday so I incentivise communication among the team, so that we are alerted of each other tasks and may help each other’. Bravante went through a substantial corporate restructuring process at the end of 2015 and to reduce liabilities and expenses, legal has recently internalised and centralised all of the administrative processes and communications with their biggest client, Petrobras. Laufer is described by peers as a ‘brilliant lawyer with vast experience in corporate consultancy and commercial litigation’, and she concedes that the centralisation process was a huge undertaking on their part, ‘considering these tasks were previously attributed to three different areas and many different professionals’. She adds: ‘We are now able to avoid contractual penalties that, in the past, had been overlooked or accepted by the respective operational area’. The team has also made a huge effort to reach out to all areas of the business, in order to remediate a distance that many managers had towards the legal department in connection with possible preventive actions and measures, in which it can be of assistance. ‘We now feel that the different corporate areas are more connected and we are generally able to avoid future liabilities toward clients, tax liabilities or regulatory issues which, in the past, had been the product of lack of communication between the areas and lack of consultation to the legal department’. This incredibly proactive team continues to add value and work to push the company’s strategic agenda in the maritime sector.