Rui de Oliveira Neves rejoins Morais Leitão

Morais Leitão has announced the return of partner Rui de Oliveira Neves, after more than eight years as Legal director at GALP

Morais Leitão have hired Galp’s former Legal director, Rui de Oliveira Neves. The lawyer rejoins the firm having left just over eight years ago, and was one of their youngest partners ever at the age of just 31. During the last eight years, Neves has built one of the biggest and most sophisticated in-house Legal structures in Portugal at Galp.

On his return to Morais Leitão, Rui de Oliveira Neves will join the Corporate and M&A Department as partner.

A spokesperson from the firm said: “He will lead a new transversal area of business transformation, supporting the firm in the renewal of its offer of high value-added legal services. In addition to responding to the client’s immediate needs, Morais Leitão prioritises the offering of a truly differentiated legal advice that develops an impact service to the client, with a strategic and risk management approach that anticipates and solves the client’s challenges. Through this transformative angle, Morais Leitão acts as a business partner with deep knowledge of the client’s business and fully aligning the solutions developed with the client’s drivers, mission and values, thus contributing to the sustainability and resilience of the client’s business.”

Rui de Oliveira Neves (pictured) said, “I rejoin Morais Leitão at a particularly auspicious – and happy – moment for a very stimulating work of business transformation, in the way we interpret it and also execute it. The legal practice needs to respond, in a transversal manner, to the current and effective challenges of business, reinventing itself for actual impact on the client’s business, through the generation of value. I get on a train that is already rolling at full speed, but adding a privileged point of view, which is my long in-house experience. It will therefore be a reconciliation of approaches, increasingly focusing the law on the client’s business.”

Nuno Galvão Teles, managing partner, said: “The return of our partner Rui de Oliveira Neves means excellent news for Morais Leitão. We are leading the transformation of the law practice, so that it is increasingly focused on the development of the client’s own business. Rui left us almost ten years ago to lead the transformation on the client side, developing the need for permanent and extremely competent legal in-house advice. Today, he returns to close this cycle of transformation on the exact opposite path, integrating the business into the development of legal solutions. It is a happy return home.”