Frederico Martins, Mattos Filho: Diversity and inclusion help your team thrive, not just business

Could you tell our viewers about your professional journey thus far?

My name is Fred, and I am a Brazilian lawyer. I work for a law firm as a Senior Associate at a law firm called Mattos Filho, and I’ve been practicing law for 13 years now. Time flies because I graduated from law school in 2008 and have been a litigator ever since. Eventually I moved to Sao Paolo in 2012 and completed my master’s degree here. But I graduated law school in 2008 and I’ve been a litigator ever since.

I’ve been with Mattos Filho since 2016, and in that time I also relocated to New York for a while, which was an incredible experience to live in a completely new culture whilst I practiced further in antitrust law and so on. Before my return to Sao Paolo last June, I also had a small stint of living in Brasilia where I was doing litigation in the Superior Court, Supreme Court and alike.

Other than being a lawyer, I’m also really passionate about music. I come from a family of musicians, so it seems like a big contrast to have a passion for law. But that’s the great thing about my career, it has genuinely been built on passion and my hard work is a result of that.

The organisation you are working for practices in numerous industries, including crypto assets, capital markets, investments, and finance. During your exposure to these sectors, how have you seen regulations and laws evolve around these industries?

It isn’t uncommon to see that regulations and trends aren’t always evolving at the same pace as industry trends. And in our firm we joke that I was always doing rocket science, so we have the opportunity to shape laws and regulations as we go. Particularly in these kinds of industries, such as technology, crypto and so on, we see that everything is evolving so fast and sometimes laws and regulations just cannot keep up.

So, you have to be creative which is great because it makes it exciting and challenging. But it’s also like working on a blank canvas and you must piece together numerous elements from the law. It’s really interesting because I also have the opportunity to talk to regulators and legislators and explain how the industry is evolving and how regulations should be shaped. Whether we like the pace or regulations, they are essential to the compartmentalisation and facilitate the industry’s ability to move forward. So, while others may not, I do consider myself to be a creative person in my career. There is so much to do, and so much thinking and creativity needed to find the right solution, and I love working with cutting edge legislation because it gives you this opportunity to be a subject of this change.

An example of finding the right answer in murky territory can be seen here in Brazil. For a regulation to come into place here in Brazil, it has to go through different branches of government and a different kind of self-approval. And if somebody began dealing crypto now in Brazil, there are no strict regulations that deal with crypto, but there are regulations for banks. So there is this grey area where you can act, but inevitably we need to have regulations and laws in play to prevent ill-behaviour. At the moment where we lack regulation on crypto, it is being used to launder money, and it’s hard for legislators and regulators to keep up and ahead of these rising innovations.  Unfortunately, with the way regulation is shaped, particularly in Brazil and every civil law of a country, it’s always going to be one or two steps behind. But that doesn’t mean that you can make progress, or you can’t deal here. It’s just means that you’re going to need a lawyer like myself or my firm that’s creative enough to act, even in grey areas, and talk to stakeholders and push the regulation agenda to make the industry environment more secure and predictable.

What’s a day in the life like for a Senior Associate at work?

Well, it’s honestly incredibly busy. Working in a big firm means we deal with numerous cases at once and they are all involving different forms of litigation. But that is what I find exciting! We have a joke in our firm about how working one year in the firm is the same to several years in real life, because of the high pressures with different cases and the huge workload. There is a level of additional responsibility because, like I said before, it feels like working with rocket science and I contribute to really cutting-edge cases as I contribute to the Brazilian legal system.

Aside from the more practical side of my work, I also manage a team of approximately twenty people, which is a great opportunity to develop leadership skills and people management. I believe heavily in interpersonal skills, and I enjoy creating bonds and sharing my knowledge. Being a Senior Associate, I have the chance to also influence the careers of Junior Associates when I engage with them. And the idea of contributing to their career is an amazing feeling.

D&I is something very important to you. How do you think organisations can create a more inclusive and open environment?

I think the first thing they should always do is raise awareness over diversity and inclusion. And I’ll give you the example of how I came into diversity inclusion and started working with that, too. I think I haven’t touched the subject so far, but when I joined my firm there was a policy of respect, but we didn’t talk about specific issues such as women’s issues, LGBTQ+ and so on. So, a group of attorneys in the firm had this idea of creating a group in which people can talk about LGBTQ+ issues and invited me to join. I had the opportunity to put the group together and then present it to higher management of the firm; and we got approval to continue our work and champion our cause, and I’ve been coordinating the group ever since.

And this was like the big turning point for D&I to me. And, because it was when I came out of the corporate closet and decided to authentically live as myself in the corporate world and like say like, ‘okay, I’m gay, there’s nothing wrong with that’. Because before that I always had this fear that talking about my sexual orientation in the workplace would be detrimental to promotions and my career. This is an example of how important it is to speak about different forms of diversity and inclusion, because before my time at this firm I found it hard to find a sense of belonging. But here I feel as though I do belong and that I can be my true self at work, which is important because I feel safe talking about my perspective, and I see that other employees also vocalise their standpoints. I feel that initiatives like these help people to grow as professionals, and people are more prone to feel an affiliation to the institution and be more productive.

There is of course a greater benefit because people are more positive and passionate towards the company they work for, which drives productivity. And ultimately I feel that this is a goal all places of work should have. Diversity and inclusion aren’t something that should only be seen as good for business, but it creates the right environment for your team to thrive.

I’ve even noticed how my work with diversity and inclusion and leading people has also helped because it helped shape this kind of inclusive leadership style that today is fundamental when you’re dealing with multi-generational teams. With younger generations like Gen Z and Millennials, they need to feel included in every decision-making process, and that is something that we can nurture by promoting diversity and inclusion.

So the best way to start creating a more inclusive environment is by raising awareness and having conversations in groups and training. It is also helpful to have educational content in the workplace that can begin to shift peoples mindsets and understand the value behind D&I. I don’t just speak from my own coming out of the corporate closet, but also the understanding that organisations should keep in mind that an inclusive space will help people feel comfortable and be their true selves at work. People should feel safe enough and be comfortable in the workplace because that will make them better employees. But the organisations should be aware that they need to build this inclusive workplace that people feel safe enough to come out.

How do you balance your career in law, alongside your passion for having a voice in D&I?

I always say it’s balancing between my day job and my gay job! I’m personally invested in D&I, so it’s something that I will always find the time for. But the trick is that we can’t rely only on ourselves because it needs more people and the leadership engagement to make a cause like diversity and inclusion a more institutional cause, rather than just personal.  And if I take the time to go abroad and further educate myself or climb on a career path, I must be sure that there are going to be people advancing that agenda within the organisation. It’s something that you would be doing for the greater good of an organisation of a period of your personal career.

It’s great to be invested in it, but I know that it is also a big job to commit to and fulfil. Sometimes it will feel like you need to find a way to juggle between your career and passions, but it’s like any other passion people have. I think because I am so invested emotionally that I will work to make sure I balance it out so that I am not letting go of my career or my passions. Sometimes you notice that one area of your life will take a backseat for a week while you focus on the other parts, and then it will shift again. Everything balances out.

What makes it better is that I get to bring my passion into my career, because in a leadership role at the firm, I have the opportunity of not only being involved in the policy making, but also mentoring young associates that are LGBTQ+ and help them develop themselves in a corporate career. And this is such an incredible thing from my perspective, because it’s uncommon to see a gay person in my career and be so open. So, it’s a fantastic opportunity, and it makes life easier for the coming generations too.

What advice would you give to somebody who wants to champion a cause or group into their place of work? How can they begin the process?

I would say that the first step is to form a good support group that brings people together to share ideas with, and then remember the importance of benchmarking against the market and what people are doing in other organisations. And at some point you have established your baseline, you want to try to build consensus with your top management.

It’s important to remember that it’s not just about your personal agenda, but you can shape it as an organisational agenda which will help to bring top management on board. And then you’re going to have to like open it up to the whole organisation to gain traction, hear their ideas, provide them content, and identify what the personal and specific organisational issues are that you want to try to handle.

This process is the way that I went about it and I saw great success from it. And it’s the same advice that I give to others in my firm who want to push for something they are passionate about. Just remember that you should always benchmark against what is out there and then exchange ideas, because nothing is an industry secret, and we can always improve our ideas. So, we should share because it will make everyone’s workplace happier and better, and that should be one of our goals in life.

How do you define success?

That’s the toughest one, because sometimes we are defining success over the lenses of the others. So sometimes what we have achieved is because this is what society defines for us to do. And yet when I’ve fulfilled those successes, I’m often left feeling frustrated.I do feel as though I have the greatest sense of accomplishment now that I have had throughout my career, but I really think I’m just beginning. But up to now I feel like success is also knowing that I have inspired someone and they’re looking at their future career and having me in their minds. I think this for me is success. I don’t know if it comes across as vanity, but I had a junior colleague who was with me in court the other day, and she observed me doing my thing and it felt empowering to know that somebody else could feel a positive change from my leadership and mentoring. And after the court session, she called me and told me that I was the exact lawyer that she wanted to become; and I was genuinely so touched on so many levels. There is no money in the world that will buy this kind of like sense of accomplishment.