Jonas Fanton

Jonas Fanton's practice concentrates on complex business and wealth matters, with an emphasis on shareholder disputes, the structuring of commercial relationships, and the legal organization of family and business wealth. He has roughly twenty years in practice, working across advisory and contentious matters as a single, integrated practice.

There is a difference between being consulted about a decision and being in the room where it takes shape. This career has run along both sides — national and international firms, and the in-house environments of Brazilian and multinational companies.

A problem, when it arrives, rarely arrives already framed. It arrives as a clause nobody discussed at signing, a shareholder relationship that deteriorated with no defined milestone, a number that makes sense only to someone who followed the history. Reading the risk from that raw material — rather than from a question already narrowed for you — changes what comes into view.

That experience was formed above all in corporate work: reorganizations, joint ventures, and mergers and acquisitions, some of them cross-border. Alternating between sides of the table, and between jurisdictions, teaches you what the other side will ask for before it asks.

Contract work follows the same logic. Structuring, review and negotiation of large commercial contracts, with tailored clauses and internal instruments to control non-compliance — the work of writing today the document that a judge will read years from now, knowing nothing of the parties' history.

Not every exposure is resolved by prevention. On the contentious side, he has led shareholder, contractual, civil, real estate, banking and antitrust disputes, with procedural strategy set by the financial and reputational impact of each case. Elsewhere, he has worked on tax planning and advisory matters, on administrative and judicial proceedings aimed at reducing liabilities and recovering credits, and on compliance programs under Brazil's General Data Protection Law, aligned with the European regulation where the client's operations required it.

The sectors served over that period range from construction and metallurgy to agribusiness, and include healthcare, real estate development, retail, technology and cybersecurity — and, in a good share of them, family-held business groups.

He conceived and founded Fanton Advogados around a definition of how this work should be conducted, and designed the firm to sustain it: a small number of matters, direct involvement in each, the responsible lawyer present from the first analysis through to defending the decision. Responsibility that is not delegated — not by the person deciding, and not by the person answering for the analysis.