The Firm is largely oriented towards high level legal advice and representation in an area defined as INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS LAW. It starts from its regulatory component, largely relying on competition law and economic regulation, spilling over to other non-strictly regulatory components. It is also very much focused on the decisive transnational dimension of business transactions, in particular the one associated with the European integration process, based on EU law.
Corporate and Financial
Corporate and Financial
From its core niche of high level legal analysis and reasoning on the regulatory pillar of international business law the Firm also derives a capacity to deal with issues of corporate law and financial law, required to structure major international business transactions. This involves, inter alia, dealing with multiple aspects – either from a comprehensive perspective either producing advice through specific legal opinions on certain aspects of any given transactions (including legal opinions produced at the request of other Law Firms following such transactions) – of take-over transactions, leveraged buyouts, forms of corporate restructuring (including restructuring in the context, if the case may be, of bankruptcy procedures), or various forms of structured finance (comprehending due diligence of those various transactions or the production of specific legal opinions related with particular aspects of those due diligence procedures that need to be certified or validated either from a national law or EU law perspective). The members of the Firm have an important track-record of advising on various legal aspects of these international transactions involving repercussions in the Portuguese jurisdictions or in the jurisdictions of various Portuguese speaking countries in cooperation with reference and top level international law firms. Again, the extensive experience of its Founding Partner on privatization procedures conducted in Portugal in the course of the two recent decades – involving multiple structured business transactions – plays an important part in this experience of advising at top level international transactions raising key issues of corporate and financial law (including, e.g. dealing with multi-layered syndicates of investment banks and various financial products issued by those entities). Furthermore, the previous experience of the Founding Partner as member of the Board of the Portuguese Insurance and Pension Funds Regulatory and Supervisory Authority, with exposure to negotiation and approval of important legal instruments at international and EU level (e.g. presiding working groups of the Council leading to the approval of the Insurance Winding-up Directive and of the Auto Insurance Directive during the Portuguese presidency of the Council in the first semester of 2000) qualify the Firm to advise on multiple financial products in the growing wider domain of Bancassurance. Recent advisory experience also includes assessing various forms of collateral that might be used in complex international transactions of bond issuing (including issuance of sovereign debt and classes of assets to be used as collateral involving, e.g., issues relevant in terms of the functioning of the European System of Central Banks) and issues pertaining to the payment cards sector and payment systems in general in the context of the EU.
