Business Law publications are awarded in Sao Paulo

On August 31, FGV’s Sao Paulo Law School (Direito SP) announced the winners of the award for best term papers of the school’s Professional Master's in the field of Business Law. Three papers from each field were awarded for the relevance of their subjects and their contribution towards advancing the interaction between legal aspects and specific market needs. The messy feud between French corporation Casino and Brazilian businessman Abílio Diniz to control the GPA was used as a case study for student Lara Brito de Almeida Domingues Neves to write her thesis, titled “Shared Ownership and Solving Deadlocks: Companhia Brasileira de Distribuição Case Study”, under Direito SP’s field of Business Law. Building upon the paper’s initial premise to study the allocation of decision-making powers and how ownership is shared in corporations, Neves was guided by her advisor, Viviane Muller Prado, to use a real-life case as a starting point for her research. “As I gathered information and studied the GPA case, I started to question how certain decisions were made, what the conditions of the shareholders’ agreement were, and what had changed over time”, said the lawyer. The paper written by Rodrigo Kopke Salinas, titled “Audiovisual Co-production Agreement: A Networked Economic Operation”, also won the award, addressing not only new decision-making methods, but also the impacts of new structures in certain markets. According to Salinas, in order to become a multifaceted business, the structure of audiovisual production agreements must be designed in a way that the central part holds the specifics of the operation, and the edges hold funding modalities, forming an interdependent network of sorts. The theoretical basis to design such model was borrowed from German sociologist Gunther Teubner, as well as other models consolidated in the legal field, such as the franchise model. “Audiovisual products involve multiple suppliers, who have different ways of reporting to different financers.  Each compartment of this complex system has rights and duties and act independently, while also working under the same umbrella. Therefore, the network concept grants an interpretative outlook for agreements and rescales the related risks”, said the lawyer. The third paper awarded in the field of Business Law was written by Frederico Bastos Pinheiro Martins, addressing the obstacles facing private lawsuits for damages caused by cartels. According to the abstract, the author addressed analyses of related legal institutions, comparing how such cases were treated in other jurisdictions, analyzing the interpretation of Brazilian courts regarding these cases throughout the handful of private lawsuits for damages caused by cartels that have been ruled upon so far, as well as interviewing CADE authorities to provide the perspective of competition authority to the research project, particularly regarding the sharing of documents from administrative proceedings. Direito SP’s Professional Master’s program was the first in the category approved by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), created for private and public attorneys, regulators, justices, managers and professionals responsible for public policies, as well as members of criminal investigation and prosecution agencies. The program is intended for legal professionals have already mastered the technical aspects of their respective fields and now wish to expand their theoretical knowledge and improve practical skills. Go to the website to access these and other term papers of the Professional Master's program.