quarta-feira, 30 de outubro de 2019

Brasil e Emirados miram parceria estratégica


Durante visita do presidente Jair Bolsonaro ao país árabe foram assinados oito acordos e memorandos de entendimentos. Um deles prevê o desenvolvimento de iniciativas de alto nível em diferentes áreas.
 27/10/2019 
Alexandre Rocha
Abu Dhabi – O Brasil e os Emirados Árabes Unidos assinaram neste domingo (27) oito acordos e memorandos de entendimentos em diferentes áreas, durante visita do presidente Jair Bolsonaro ao país árabe. Bolsonaro se reuniu com o príncipe-herdeiro de Abu Dhabi, Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, e com o emir de Dubai, Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, que é também vice-presidente e primeiro-ministro da nação do Golfo. Os dois governos divulgaram declaração conjunta informando que “os líderes decidiram alçar as relações bilaterais ao nível de parceria estratégica”.


Para formalizar esta decisão, foi firmado um memorando de entendimentos com o objetivo de “estabelecer diretrizes para o desenvolvimento de iniciativas de alto nível nas áreas de paz e segurança; de cooperação econômica, especialmente em comércio, investimento, indústria, infraestrutura, agricultura, transporte e espaço exterior (sideral); de cooperação energética, e articulação de mecanismos conjuntos no campos do turismo, cultura e esportes”.
Além deste documento, foram assinados acordos de assistência mútua em matéria aduaneira, e de troca e proteção mútua de informação classificada e material. Outros convênios tratam de cooperação em inteligência artificial, cooperação estratégica para expansão da capacidade produtiva do setor de defesa, desenvolvimento, produção e comercialização de produtos de defesa, de apoio às exportações e reexportações entre Abu Dhabi e o Brasil, e sobre conservação da biodiversidade
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“Com as medidas adotadas por nosso governo, nós estamos cada vez mais recuperando a confiança do mundo e mostrando que o Brasil é um bom local para investimentos”, disse Bolsonaro ao príncipe Al Nahyan. “Temos muito a oferecer aos Emirados Árabes, em especial na questão do agronegócio. O Brasil tem interesse em investimentos, em tecnologia e em outras áreas que estão sendo discutidas por nossos respectivos ministros”, acrescentou.
A questão da segurança alimentar foi abordada também na declaração conjunta. Os Emirados e os países árabes em geral têm grande preocupação em garantir o abastecimento de seus mercados com alimentos, uma vez que a produção da região é deficitária, e veem no Brasil um parceiro de peso nesta área. Daí a ênfase na promoção de investimentos no agronegócio brasileiro e na infraestrutura ligada ao setor.

O presidente ainda assistiu a uma apresentação de jiu-jítsu e visitou a Grande Mesquita Xeique Zayed, marco religioso e arquitetônico de Abu Dhabi. Ele e sua delegação circularam pelas imponentes instalações sob os olhares curiosos dos muitos turistas que passavam pelo local.
Firjan
No final do dia, Bolsonaro teve uma reunião com um grupo reduzido de empresários do Brasil e dos Emirados, organizado pela Federação das Indústrias do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Firjan) no hotel Emirates Palace.
Participaram do encontro cerca de 20 empresários brasileiros e um número semelhante de homens de negócios do país árabe, além de outras autoridades dos dois governos.

O presidente da Câmara de Comércio Árabe Brasileira, Rubens Hannnun, e o vice-presidente de Relações Internacionais da entidade, Osmar Chohfi, estiveram na reunião. “A Câmara teve a oportunidade de se colocar como facilitadora dos negócios entre os Emirados Árabes Unidos e o Brasil”, comentou Hannun. Ele lembrou que a instituição tem no país do Golfo um escritório internacional, localizado em Dubai.



terça-feira, 8 de outubro de 2019

Big Money Is Betting On Legal Industry Transformation



If “Money makes the world go ‘round,” then the legal world is spinning as never before. Law has been big business for decades, but only recently has significant venture capital, private equity, and entrepreneur money been pumped into the legal sector. Last year saw an eye-popping 718% increase in legal industry investment, and this year’s capital infusion through the third-quarter has already surpassed last year’s $1 billion total and could well double it. Capital is turbocharging customer-centric providers that are leveraging technology, process, new skillsets, and data to transform the legal function and the delivery of legal services.
Why the sudden legal investment boom; what’s changed; and what does it portend? Short answers: legal delivery is ripe for scaled transformation; legal buyers are driving change and have disaggregated legal practice from the delivery of legal services; and the lawyer-centric, labor-intensive, fragmented legal industry is ripe for tech and process-driven consolidation. Technology, process, labor arbitrage, an agile workforce, the proliferation of cross and multi-border business, automation, products replacing services, platforms, automation, data, and incipient regulatory reform are transforming the legal sector—just as they have others. Capital is accelerating, scaling, and consolidating the industry.
Legal Delivery Is Not Unique—It’s Tech And Business Driven
Legal practice may have its own practice rules, but legal delivery is now operating by business standards. The practice of law has not changed much, although what is now deemed practice is a shrinking subset of what it was even a decade ago. The delivery of legal services, however, has undergone a dramatic transformation during this same period. Law firms have lost their hegemony over legal delivery. Their market share is eroding. A growing number of corporate legal departments and customer-centric providers with corporate structures, economic models that reward output (results) rather than input (hours billed) are reshaping legal delivery. They deploy business process, project management, and fiscal responsibility, new tools, new skills, data-driven, multi-disciplinary workforces, and a customer service mindset necessary in the digital era.
Law is a Trillion-dollar global industry with no Goliaths. The legal industry is fragmented, growing, has a huge untapped market for its services, and is ripe for digital transformation. Lawyers long peddled the now debunked myth that legal practice is bespoke and unique. No such claims can been made for legal delivery that has the same core ingredients as a slew of upstarts that have disrupted other industries. That list includes customer-aligned, tech and process-enabled, differentiated models; technology platforms that integrate internal resources, align with others in the supply chain, and provide easy access to clients; upskilled workforces; cultures of constant improvement; a re-imagination of the customer experience; and capital to scale. These are among the reasons why capital is pouring into the legal delivery (a/k/a legal tech).
Law’s Shifting Focus: From Lawyers To Customers
Law has long been inward-facing. Its focus has been on input--hours and billing-- not output--results and customer satisfaction.  So too has profit-per-partner, not net promoter score been law's Holy Grail. Lawyers, not clients, long called the shots. They defined what a legal matter was; used self-regulation to parry competition from other professionals; carved out territorial practice boundaries to discourage competition from “outside” lawyers; and retained near-exclusive access to legal source materials. Law firms sold one thing: legal expertise, and they cornered the market. Firms dictated the terms of engagement to clients—what they determined was best; the value they ascribed to a matter; what was necessary to achieve what they deemed the best possible legal work; who performed it and how much time was required; how and when work was delivered; and at what cost. Clients were generally compliant because law firms had a uniform modus operandi.  Law was a guild.
All that has changed. Now firms face competition. The cognitive bias  among legal buyers to engage traditional partnership model law firms has eroded. The global financial crisis and its reboot of the buy-sell dynamic of goods and services; globalization; astonishing advances in technology; and digital transformation have convinced legal buyers that legal practice is no longer synonymous with the delivery of legal services. These factors, coupled with unmet market need, are the fertile soil that new providers have cultivated. Capital is now scaling their harvest.
 Clients—not lawyers—are now calling the shots and driving the transformation of the legal industry. Lawyers long controlled the delivery of legal services because legal expertise was its sole ingredient. Those days are gone—both for lawyers as well as allied legal professionals who, with machines, are now integral components of the legal workforce and supply chain. Legal delivery has morphed into a three-legged stool supported by legal, technological, and business expertise. Legal expertise is no longer, to borrow from Reggie Jackson, “the straw that stirs the drink.”
It’s The Model That Matters
Smart money is betting that lawyers can function far more efficiently outside the traditional partnership model. It’s also betting that elite legal talent can, as necessary, be dislodged from traditional firms. There’s good reason for them to think so-- peripatetic partners (“laterals”) have swapped firms for decades. That means that money--not the firm--is the glue that binds.
If lawyers can jump firms, so too can they jump delivery models—for a price. The Big Four and other legal providers have already cherrypicked elite legal talent from top-rank firms. This means that practice expertise—even at the elite level—is available. Powerful, scaled legal delivery providers like the Big Four, UnitedLex, and others with global reach, multidisciplinary workforces, models aligned with business, deep war chests, and digital transformation expertise can readily meld legal expertise with delivery capability to provide end-to-end enterprise legal services. Law firms continue to provide single-point, practice-centric solutions. Law firms were once sole-source suppliers. Now, they are a diminishing segment of a legal supply chain where differentiated legal expertise is part of a larger whole.
Capital And Scale
Legal providers must deliver at scale to be competitive in today’s emerging global marketplace, and that requires capital. LegalZoom recently received a $500M round of secondary funding at a $2Billion valuation—almost 500% more than what it was in 2014. That brings the company’s total capital haul to approximately $800MillionUnitedLex, a leading enterprise legal services company took in $500M from  private equity powerhouse CVC Capital Partners to capitalize on a “multi-billion dollar opportunity.” Axiom, the leading agile legal talent management provider, recently received a “very substantial” investment from Permira, another private equity heavyweight. This was not Permira’s first foray into the legal vertical; it had previously made substantial investments in LegalZoom and Duff and PhelpsBob Ambrogi, a legal industry stalwart, provides a fuller 2019 investment scorecard here. The list includes investment in artificial intelligence (AI) and other tech plays that are rapidly transforming the legal function and its delivery.
Then there’s the Big Four whose presence and imprint in the legal sector is receiving heightened attention. The Big Four are formidable players. They have deep C-Suite ties; multidisciplinary expertise and cross/multi-border transactions; global footprints; digital transformation prowess; commitment to constant improvement; significant investment in technology; and are doubling-down on enterprise legal services. Their annual revenue is approximately twelve times that of the largest grossing law firms. All this positions them to be major players  in the current global legal landscape.
Teaser alert: what’s to prevent Amazon, Google, or some other tech giant from entering the legal space, creating a global platform, injecting billions into infrastructure and talent, creating a global legal services hub  that connects consumers with global legal delivery sources as never before imagined? Short answer: the inclination to do so.
Big Money Has Been Watching From The Sidelines—Until Now.
 Big money has closely monitored the migration of work from firms, changing consumer attitudes, an evolving regulatory climate, and the deployment of technological advances to legal delivery. They recognize the lawyer-created barriers that balkanized legal practice do not apply to legal delivery. Technology, process, data, and other essential legal delivery components transcend geographical boundaries and can be scaled around the globe. The commonality of delivery challenges—contract management, knowledge management, data collection and mining, morphing services into products, automation, and other delivery elements-- far outweigh the differences. There is enormous opportunity for consumers to benefit from a mature global legal marketplace where a myriad of local solutions are replaced by scaled, global ones.
Capital is required to scale legal services; to keep pace with the warp-speed of business, to attract and retain top talent, to invest in upskilling , and to promote a customer-centric, diverse culture of constant improvement. Capital can, of course, come from a variety of sources—going public (permitted in the UK, Australia, and a handful of other jurisdictions), institutional capital, self-funding, and collaborative ventures. The common thread is that legal industry investment is focused on providers offering new delivery models that are aligned with the needs of consumers, not the maximization of short-term lawyer profit.
Conclusion
The recent infusion of capital into the legal industry is the best evidence that a tipping point has been reached. The hegemony of the traditional law firms is over,  and the partnership model will experience further consolidation and a thinning of the herd. This process is well underway and will accelerate.
It’s not simply how and by whom legal services are delivered that’s changing. The legal function is being recast. The legal industry would be wise to note what’s different about the models, skillsets, workforces, diversity, cultures, technology, processes, and customer service of well-capitalized providers. That’s what the smart money is doing.


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