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.
Employment
Employment
As aforementioned, the previous track-record of some of the members of the Firm as in-house lawyers responsible for human resources departments in major international multinationals ensures that the Firm is especially well equipped to deal with the most pressing legal issues of employment law, especially from the perspective of legal issues that are relevant in comprehensive terms of whole corporate groups, and not merely from the perspective of the isolated or individual corporation, something that leads to an entirely new range of legal problems that have still been seldom approached at the highest theoretical level.
This capacity is particularly important in the context of economic crisis and distress leading to multiple operations of restructuring of undertakings and groups of undertakings that have to be carefully and thoroughly planned in terms of employment law. Members of the Firm have, thus, followed several processes of restructuring of foreign or multinational groups operating in Portugal, involving both extensive negotiations with workers oriented towards voluntary agreements of termination of employment contracts and judicial procedures of collective dismissal or others. The Firm combines in this domain the ability to put forward original legal thinking and the deepest practical insight of these issues, of decisive importance in Portugal due to the level of legal uncertainty brought by the successive reforms of employment law over the course of recent years – e.g. approval and subsequent reforms of the so called Labour Code (“Código do Trabalho”), both before and after the external economic intervention in Portugal (the Summer 2011 bail out leading to a memorandum of understanding between the Portuguese State, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund).
