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| Additional information |
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| Lippert & Cia - Advogados |
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Mission statement:
To provide legal solutions
founded on ethics and excellence
to companies and investors. |
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History:
Our office opened its doors on November 16th, 1964, in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. It was located on the fourth floor of the Sulacap Building, on the corner of Andradas Street (the real name of Rua da Praia) and Borges de Medeiros Avenue, the heart of the city in those years.
It was a small office but its facilities and layout were carefully designed by my wife, and it was perfectly suited to our needs.
Our office then specialized in offering legal counsel to budding local companies with business interests in Brazil and overseas.
It was a stroke of luck when, shortly before opening the office, I ran into a friend on Rua da Praia. This friend was involved in the car business and asked me to prepare a study on the legal aspects of a new type of credit plan to finance the purchase of vehicles that was being implemented in the central area of the country - a consorcio, which was a joint-purchase plan for the acquisition of durable goods such as vehicles. A couple of months later, the first car consorcio in the state was in full swing and by the end of the year, twenty new groups were in operation.
The sound legal counsel we offered to these first groups helped us establish our reputation as a reliable law firm. Our clients then started to seek our services to deal with any other legal issues that concerned their businesses.
The first step had been taken.
In those years, Brazil was experiencing an economic boom which required fast, reliable solutions on the part of legal consultants, particularly in the fields of corporate, tax and real estate law, as well as those aspects related to joint ventures. It is no exaggeration to say that the existing legal structure had to undergo dramatic changes to adapt to that new reality, and this was particularly true in matters related to economic issues.
Our clients, who were mostly businesses, were interested in and in fact needed to be able to respond readily to those rapid changes. Those businesspeople were faced with a highly complex reality and the same was true of their legal advisors. To better cater for those needs, we moved to a more spacious office on Marechal Floriano Street. Our office area increased sevenfold, and we were able to set up specialist legal counsel areas under the direction of highly qualified, reliable professionals, nearly all of whom had been my classmates or pupils in law school. This expansion marked the change of our small office into a law firm thereafter known as "Lippert & Cia Advogados".
As the process of intensive industrialization of Brazil progressed, new legal necessities were created and had to be promptly addressed. Quick responses were required and new specialist areas and solutions for increasingly complex situations had to be set up. To provide those services, we had to expand our expertise and develop a wider view of economic settings. That was a time when Brazilian entrepreneurs experienced a growing necessity of obtaining access to technology transfer through the acquisition of know-how or joint ventures with international corporations.
We were pioneers in many areas in our state. Some examples include the first split of a corporation, the second incorporation of a corporation with authorized capital, the first split of a limited liability company by the decision of the majority of its shareholders. At the same time, as Brazil grew and developed, so did the interest of Brazilian investors in offshore opportunities (and of foreign investors who wanted to invest in Brazil). Our office had to be ready to represent the interests of these new clients.
A new generation of businesspeople came to the fore, and corporate successions and their particularities became a part of Brazilian reality. Even today, these successions have not been fully understood.
It was then that suddenly the first signs of economic stagnation appeared in Brazil. Some foreign companies left the country, while local businesses had a choice of adapting to a new reality, changing ownership or disappearing. The most visible sign of that period was the soaring number of bankruptcies and court-supervised agreements with creditors.
But those hard times also came to pass and the economy started to show signs of recovery. The country was growing once again and new legal solutions, based on past experiences, were required to address the legal complexity of the years to come. Modern times were on our doorstep, urging us to take action in the economic and human rights fields, concepts which were no longer simple rhetoric but had suddenly become concrete legal realities in Brazil. |
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