Our Law Firm

Founded in 2000, in Rio de Janeiro, the Paulo Freitas Ribeiro Advogados Associados Law Firm stands out for its expertise and success on both corporate and economic criminal law mandates.

When we started to advocate in the criminal field thirty years ago, criminal law was undergoing a transition. Classic criminal law, based on the protection of individual assets, such as freedom, life and property, was supplemented by the Economic Criminal Law.

Traditionally, classic criminal law would take care of individuals, either victims or indictees of criminal offenses against other people. Because of its nature, criminal law, unlike civil
and commercial law, has always been a product of craftmanship, practiced by small law firms, in which few lawyers dealt directly with cases entrusted to them by their clients.

In the late 1980s, however, criminal law expanded to other domains. Laws have been enacted to protect both special and common interests. Criminal law has started to deal not
only with harms to individual interests, but also with damages to common interests, such as the environment, the financial system and free competition. And that is how the economic criminal law is born. Managers and employees of large corporations may be held liable for criminal conducts. Companies may also be investigated and the management team may also be charged for crimes.

It is in this context that our practice has grown. Having experienced classic criminal law, we saw the rise and development of economic criminal law, which allowed us to work on many
of the major cases involving economic crimes in Brazil. However, in recent years, the reality of criminal investigations into economic crimes has drastically changed, especially due to the processes related to Operation Car Wash.

Until then, invasive precautionary measures were rarely taken in economic crimes. From then on, precautionary arrests, searches and seizures and breaches of confidentiality have
become increasingly common, posing short-term risks to individuals and corporations which, after fulfilled, can inflict nearly irreparable damages.

In addition, with the tightening up of the criminal justice, cooperation instruments and leniency agreements have also become common, although there is still widespread legal
uncertainty regarding these legal devices.

Still within the scope of transformations in criminal law, criminal prosecution authorities have organized themselves and currently use technologies that enable big data analytics.
As a consequence, practicing criminal law has become even more challenging. This is because we now also need technologies that allow us to provide an overall effectiveness to ensure the parity of resources and to produce an effective change in how we practice law, as we now need to devise a strategy to handle each case, both in the short term (dealing with precautionary measures) and in the long term.

Classic criminal law forged the classic criminal lawyer. The new lawyer now has to adapt to a new reality, without losing the soul of criminal law, which is the fight for the protection of
individual rights. The challenge of modern criminal law is to understand the demands and functioning of corporations, without losing the crafty aspect of criminal defense. It is about deeply
knowing the company and its needs, as well as the technological devices of both the prosecution and the defense, without forgetting that the lawsuit will always be brought on a human being.

It is about being technical, but not a robot. This is the challenge we propose to face.