Judicial specialization in matters of business law is the subject of a recommendation made to all Brazilian courts in National Justice Council Resolution 56 of 2019. The Sao Paulo State Court of Appeals has been debating this type of specialization in the realm of business since at least 2006.

In due course, this led to the establishment of two business and arbitration conflict courts in the city of Sao Paulo in December 2017, followed by two other business courts in the First Judicial Administrative Region in December 2019. The latter two courts have jurisdiction over the whole of Greater Sao Paulo except the city of Sao Paulo.

In her thesis for her academic master’s in law and development at Fundação Getulio Vargas’ Sao Paulo Law School, Ana Paula Ribeiro Nani carried out empirical research into the efficacy of these business courts in Sao Paulo in terms of judging cases involving business law.

The thesis, titled “Sao Paulo’s Business Courts: Impacts on Average Processing Time, Quality of Decisions and Predictability of Business-Related Cases,” was the subject of a debate held at the FGV Sao Paulo Law School on August 1, 2023.

One of Nani’s chosen evaluation criteria was case processing speed. She looked at different lawsuit categories, and in the category related to the partial dissolution of companies, she found that the average judgment time was 426.1 days in the common (non-specialized) courts and 269.5 days in the business courts, equating to a reduction of approximately 37%.

“The idea behind this work was to find out whether all the expected benefits of these courts, specifically with regard to three criteria – average processing time, quality of decisions and predictability of judgments in business matters – have actually happened,” the author explains.

See the complete study here.