Rödl & Partner further expands legal advisory in Portugal in the Lisbon and Porto offices

Lisbon/Porto, January 2018: Rödl & Partner further expands its legal advisory in Portugal, having acquired a majority stake of the law firm BHLP in Lisbon and Porto. As a long-standing partner, BHLP has been closely associated with Rödl & Partner Portugal in the past. Rödl & Partner Portugal thus welcomes two very experienced Managing Partners of BHLP – Filipe Lobo d'Avila (43) and Luis de Andrade Pinhel (42).
 
Filipe Lobo d'Avila is a member of the Portuguese Bar Association and was the General Director of the Ministry of Justice and the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs between July 2011 and December 2013. Since February 2015, he has acted as one of the Managing Partners of BHLP in Portugal, where he has been responsible for the areas of M&A and Public Law. Lobo d'Avila is a member of the Portuguese Parliament and a former spokesman for the Portuguese centre-right party.
 
Luis de Andrade Pinhel is also a member of the Portuguese Bar Association, and was, among others, a legal adviser to the Board of Directors of a pharmaceutical company in Madrid (Spain). Additionally, he was also a legal adviser to the Portuguese Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Justice. Since August 2010, he has acted as one of the Managing Partners of BHLP and has been responsible for the areas of Finance and Corporate Law. De Andrade Pinhel is also a member of the Board of Directors of various commercial companies.
 
In addition to Filipe Lobo d'Avila and Luis de Andrade Pinhel, Leonor Xavier (50) has also joined Rödl & Partner. She is a long-term member of the International Tax Law group and holds a degree in business management and tax law. Xavier was actively engaged in various Portuguese and international tax law cases and managed numerous foreign investment projects (in particular those implemented by Brazilian investors in Portugal).

To provide German clients with expert advice on Portugal in both the German and Portuguese languages from Germany, Dr. Susana Campos Nave, the German-Portuguese Attorney at Law and specialist lawyer for criminal law, has also joined the team led by Lobo d'Avila and de Andrade Pinhel. Campos Nave advises clients from the Rödl & Partner offices in Lisbon and Berlin.
 
The offices in Lisbon and Porto liaise closely with the offices in Madrid and Barcelona under the leadership of Partner Georg Abegg, as German companies treat Portugal and Spain as a single economic area of the Iberian peninsula. Rödl & Partner is now able to advise its clients on the Iberian peninsula from a single source.
 
After Spain, Germany is Portugal’s biggest trading partner, whose economy is being driven by a growing export rate. The industry, with its numerous highly qualified jobs, is of particular interest to German investors, especially the automotive, medical technology and renewables sectors.

Rödl & Partner is present in Lisbon and Porto with an interdisciplinary team of lawyers, auditors and tax consultants, offering multilingual advisory on all matters related to commercial and corporate law, employment and tax law as well as investment law.