By combining academic training in both Law and International Relations, together with sustained engagement with national, international, and transnational normative frameworks, I developed a way of understanding the structures that underpin international economic and political power.

I belong to a generation that critically examined the cognitive frameworks that historically shaped international law, alongside a strong desire to democratize global relations. I believe that aspiration is shared by many scholars and leaders across BRICS countries.

Against the backdrop of the growth of emerging economies and the systemic lessons of the 2008 global financial crisis, many young professionals from developing countries sought more meaningful participation in addressing global challenges. The gradual formation of BRICS from 2006 onward, and its development into an institutional platform with summits and coordinated positions, was deeply inspiring to my generation.

I had followed BRICS since graduate school, but the turning point came during my LL.M. studies, when I joined the Centre for BRICS Studies at the University of São Paulo in 2016. Through that work, it became clear to me that few global initiatives possess the same potential to amplify the voice of developing countries and contribute to a more equitable international order.

I regularly study international and transnational regulatory developments and assess how they affect the legal systems of BRICS countries from a comparative law perspective. This approach has been useful across all of the practice areas I work in.

It allows me to identify specific legal functions inside domestic legal systems and to build structured comparative insights. My research also gave me exposure to the legal cultures of the original BRICS countries, including South Africa, as well as the historical conditions that shaped those jurisdictions.

That background has given me a working understanding of the intellectual traditions and legal cultures that inform decision-making in different BRICS countries. In practice, this helps me communicate with greater clarity, precision, and sensitivity when explaining how Brazilian law and institutions operate to foreign clients.

My doctoral research examined how international law influences areas traditionally considered domestic, particularly administrative law. I studied preventive anti-corruption measures contained in international conventions and the legal adaptations undertaken by BRICS countries in relation to transparency, accountability, public participation, and related principles.

The research included a strong empirical component based on documentary analysis of domestic reforms and international monitoring reports. One key finding was that, although all BRICS countries reflect the influence of these conventions, they do so through distinct models of administrative law and public administration.

For clients, the practical implication is straightforward: effective risk assessment starts with understanding structural differences among state systems, including constitutional arrangements, separation of powers, administrative models, and sanctioning regimes. Foreign investors should therefore work with qualified local counsel who can clarify the regulatory environment before risk becomes exposure.

I have practiced across a broad range of legal fields in Brazil, and that breadth allows me to support foreign clients on multiple aspects of their business operations. The most important evolution in my work has been the decision to concentrate on companies from BRICS countries.

I was drawn to this field both by conviction and by market reality. Early in my practice, particularly while advising Chinese clients, I saw a significant gap: large corporations could usually retain top Brazilian firms, but small and medium-sized foreign companies often entered Brazil without trusted local legal support.

That gap creates a structural disadvantage. Without independent counsel, foreign businesses may accept legal arrangements that do not reflect their best interests, even when better alternatives exist. My specialization emerged directly from the need to reduce that vulnerability.

That role gave me an internal view of how public institutions investigate and assess corporate conduct. I dealt with highly sensitive constitutional issues in Brazilian labor law, including collective labor rights, forced labor, child labor, and severe workplace accidents.

The experience also showed me how significant collective actions can become for companies. Because those cases address harm affecting groups or classes, the financial and reputational exposure can be substantial.

Equally important, I learned how few practitioners are deeply experienced in structuring legal strategy during administrative and investigative stages, rather than only during court litigation. That perspective reinforces my emphasis on preventive legal advisory, especially for foreign investors who may not fully appreciate the constitutional and regulatory dimensions of Brazilian law.

In addition to the market gap I had already identified, I consider the present phase of international relations a defining moment for BRICS countries. BRICS was conceived as a platform for diversifying partnerships rather than replacing existing ones, but recent policy approaches from Western jurisdictions have increased pressure on BRICS countries and companies.

In that environment, strengthening trade and investment ties among BRICS members becomes more than a commercial objective. It also becomes a preventive mechanism for reducing structural dependency and vulnerability.

Founding my firm in 2025 was therefore both a professional response to an underserved market and a strategic response to a changing global landscape.

The starting point is that BRICS countries are shaped by markedly different legal traditions, constitutional structures, state models, and legal cultures. Those differences are not abstract. They become very concrete when businesses try to structure transactions, disputes, or operations across jurisdictions.

A Brazilian lawyer cannot easily master the full institutional complexity of China, India, Russia, or South Africa alone, and the reverse is equally true. That is why meaningful cross-border legal work requires active coordination among professionals from different jurisdictions.

Yet many business operations still begin without local legal counsel. My firm was created to address precisely that gap, which is especially acute in BRICS-to-BRICS transactions where differences in law, legal culture, and state structure directly affect commercial outcomes.

Large corporations entering Brazil with significant capital are usually able to secure corporate, tax, compliance, labor, and regulatory advisory from the outset. They can structure legal entities correctly, plan their tax treatment, manage labor exposure, and comply with consumer, competition, and sector-specific rules.

Small and mid-sized enterprises rarely have access to that level of support, and even large companies may decide not to allocate those resources in the early stage if the market presence is still limited. That creates a high-risk situation in an unfamiliar legal environment.

I have seen foreign companies rely entirely on explanations provided by local commercial partners, only to formalize legal arrangements that disproportionately favor the Brazilian side. In some cases, foreign businesses risk losing ownership of the goods they commercialize in Brazil because the transaction structure was not independently reviewed.

For that reason, even at an early stage, foreign companies should retain at least a basic level of independent local legal advice. It improves legal certainty and protects decision-making before problems become disputes.

There is no single standard profile in terms of project size or transaction scope. I have advised large foreign corporations, often through partnerships with foreign law firms, including on the structuring and implementation of the entire legal department of a Brazilian entity.

More often, however, clients come with focused needs. They may require pre-litigation or litigation support, employment agreement review, regulatory guidance, or preventive structuring so they can begin operating in Brazil on a sound legal basis.

The practical implication is that legal work for BRICS investors must start from the realities of the current global environment: uncertainty, protectionist measures, armed conflict, sanctions, and asymmetrical economic dependence. Legal strategy cannot be separated from that context.

It also means that advice must be tailored, culturally informed, and grounded in the economic setting of each client. Our firm therefore works with strategic partnerships in other jurisdictions so we can better understand local expectations and legal particularities.

There remains considerable room for law firms to build coordinated cross-border legal services within the BRICS framework. That is one of the areas in which I believe the profession still has significant space to develop.

A legal practice aligned with the broader cooperation agenda of the Global South takes the development priorities and structural realities of emerging economies as its operational context. That changes how transactions are assessed.

It requires more granular analysis of the normative frameworks that may better serve clients from BRICS jurisdictions, including bilateral treaties, cooperation instruments, and the practical permissibility of certain legal choices. It also requires close attention to cultural and institutional differences so legal advice is not only technically correct, but genuinely usable.

My first recommendation is diversification. BRICS countries should deepen trade and investment links among themselves in order to reduce vulnerability to sanctions and other external pressures.

I also believe bilateral agreements within the BRICS sphere should continue to develop and become clearer, because legal certainty is essential for cross-border business. Beyond that, people-to-people legal cooperation matters: legal professionals across jurisdictions need stronger interaction so transactions can rely on accessible, transnational expertise.

Each cross-border business relationship should be accompanied by legal assessment covering applicable law, comparative advantages, the permissibility of applying foreign law, domestic sector regulation, and all relevant regulatory requirements. Legal practice may not be the most visible part of international cooperation, but it is one of the structures that makes cooperation work in practice.

Labor law generates significant demand because the Brazilian labor framework is often seen by foreign investors as complex, politically sensitive, and subject to change. Clients need guidance in structuring employment policies, drafting contracts, and reducing exposure to future labor claims.

Demand is also strong in taxation, advertising compliance under consumer protection and competition law, outsourced legal department support for Brazilian subsidiaries, and administrative law matters involving licensing and regulatory compliance.

In judicial cooperation, clients often need to understand whether they may file claims in Brazil, under what conditions, and at what cost. These are practical business questions, but they depend on careful legal interpretation.

One of the most common mistakes is assuming that Brazilian legal counsel is unnecessary during contract negotiation and execution. In that situation, the foreign investor often relies on legal explanations provided by the Brazilian partner’s lawyers, whose duty is naturally aligned with the partner’s interests.

By the time those matters reach my firm, they are frequently already in conflict, either at a pre-litigation stage or in active litigation. In many cases, the underlying transaction was documented without independent preventive legal advice.

My recommendation is simple: foreign investors should retain independent local counsel from the outset. That makes the legal structure more reliable and aligns the transaction with the investor’s own strategic interests.

Investors often underestimate how central legal risk should be to the overall business assessment. They focus on financial opportunity without developing a sufficiently grounded understanding of the regulatory framework that applies to their sector.

That is why I strongly recommend the preparation of a formal legal opinion before entry. Investors should seek a baseline understanding of the main legal rules that govern their business in Brazil, rather than waiting until administrative or judicial proceedings force that learning under pressure.

Brazil’s historical reluctance toward traditional BITs was influenced in part by concern over the Argentine experience and the degree of exposure that investor-state arbitration can create under treaty models typically associated with Western practice. South Africa’s own trajectory offers a useful comparison, since it also moved away from treaty structures viewed as overly favorable to foreign investors.

Within the BRICS context, there has long been interest in less intrusive investment arrangements. China, for example, has developed treaty approaches often described in scholarship as South-South models, characterized by greater respect for domestic law and narrower substantive protection in certain phases of investment.

Brazilian law already provides stable protections for foreign investors, including constitutional protection in expropriation scenarios and a range of statutory safeguards. The advantage of the CFIA model is that it recognizes an evolving investment reality while avoiding strict adherence to the traditional BIT framework, making agreements easier to conclude while still offering an international legal framework for investors.

My own research has focused primarily on preventive anti-corruption measures, with particular attention to public administration models, transparency, accountability, and social participation across BRICS jurisdictions.

There are already relevant mechanisms in place, and BRICS has created a dedicated forum to discuss anti-corruption initiatives. To the best of my knowledge, the BRICS Anti-Corruption Forum places strong emphasis on international cooperation, especially in relation to asset recovery derived from illicit activities.

I believe the next step should be broader access and broader participation. The forum could become even more useful if it brought civil society, academics, and researchers more directly into the conversation and expanded the agenda to include both preventive and enforcement dimensions in greater depth.

In my view, diversity can only be addressed effectively through diversity itself. That means creating platforms where legal scholars and practitioners from different BRICS countries examine their legal systems together, rather than assuming a single model can bridge every gap.

Universities and cooperative academic structures within the BRICS framework are well positioned to lead those exchanges. Over time, legal education should also prepare professionals to think comparatively and to engage legal materials from international perspectives.

That is also the spirit behind my own initiative. I want my firm to help connect legal professionals across BRICS jurisdictions and contribute to deeper mutual understanding and practical legal integration.

The expansion of BRICS makes legal practice across member states more complex because the diversity of legal traditions increases with every enlargement. That complexity is not a barrier in itself, but it does require more deliberate professional coordination.

As soon as the enlargement process accelerated, I began establishing contacts with legal practitioners in those jurisdictions. For a firm that aims to become a relevant hub for BRICS-related matters, international partnerships are not optional; they are a core operational requirement.

Those partnerships support not only the exchange of information, but also the implementation of effective measures in matters involving multiple jurisdictions. The key is not to assume that every issue can be solved independently, but to build a network strong enough to deliver high-quality transnational legal services.