Telecommunications: The challenges of In-house Legal Departments in an environment of constant technology innovation and regulatory changes.

Abstract

Law schools usually teach future lawyers to work based on a very important tool: case law, that is, the collection of reported cases and their decisions that throughout the years consolidates the interpretation of the rules applied to a great variety of facts. Our new globalized and extremely competitive world imposes the successive technology innovation as an effective way to achieve success and even as the only way for some companies to survive. In this scenario where the services/products and rules are often changed, the in-house lawyers are forced to develop an authentic art of discovering and expounding the real intended signification of these new rules, in order to analyze risks properly and to suggest the best directions to be followed by the leadership of the companies. As an example, we will describe the current changes in the telecommunication industry in Brazil and the new challenges imposed to in-house legal departments