Brazilian firm promotes three to partner
Brazilian firm promotes three to partner
Brazil’s Pereira Neto | Macedo Advogados has promoted three senior associates to its partnership – boosting the total number of partners at the firm to nine.
The new partners are corporate lawyer Mônica Arruda de Toledo Piza, competition lawyer Paulo Leonardo Casagrande and tax lawyer Renata Borges La Guardia. All three promotions came into effect on 20 August.
Piza, 36, holds an LLM from the London School of Economics and specialises in corporate and M&A work. Prior to joining Pereira Neto as a senior associate in 2011, she was an associate at Demarest e Almeida Advogados and a foreign associate at the London office of Shearman & Sterling LLP. Her headline work at Pereira Neto includes advising Cielo, the Brazilian credit and debit card processing arm of Visa, in its acquisition of Braspag in June last year.
Casagrande, 32, focuses his practice on administrative, competition and regulatory law. Casagrande has worked at the Secretariat of Economic Law of the Brazilian Ministry of Justice, where he was in charge of implementing the new unit responsible for investigating bid rigging in cooperation with other enforcement agencies. During this time, he helped oversee the raid of four IT companies and one trade association suspected of conspiring to rig bids for computer services to the government. Previous roles include a year at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP between 2006 and 2007 and six years at Levy & Salomão Advogados from 1999. Since joining Pereira Neto three years ago, his notable work has included helping Swiss dental implant company Straumann acquire a stake in its Brazilian counterpart, Neodent, in June, while in 2010 he was seen helping telecoms company Oi win antitrust approval for its acquisition of Brasil Telecom as well as helping three companies in the crushed rock industry negotiate lower fines for their part in a cartel investigation.
La Guardia, 34, specialises in tax law and corporate and tax planning. Following her promotion, she will lead Pereira Neto’s tax department. As well as qualifications in law, La Guardia also holds an MBA from Fundação Getulio Vargas, one of Brazil’s leading business schools. She has worked at Pereira Neto since 2010, during which time she advised on tax issues arising from Straumann’s acquisition of Neodent.
Pereira Neto name partner Caio Mario Pereira Neto says the promotions represent an “important step in the approach of the firm to be a reference for sophisticated transactions, strategic disputes and complex administrative investigations in the Brazilian legal services market.”
Pereira Neto adds that all three lawyers have shown a “high level of legal proficiency, client service and team management” and he praises the trio for their trustworthiness and good judgement.
The promotions comes less than a month after the firm merged with corporate litigation firm França e Nunes Pereira, Advogados, in a move described as a bid to focus on more complex transactions. That merger also went some way to filling the void created by the departure 23 lawyers, including five partners, who left the firm to join the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo office of Xavier Bragança Advogados in May.