Profile: Eduardo Damião Gonçalves

Commercial Arbitration

Biography: Commercial Arbitration

Eduardo Gonçalves is a founding partner of Barretto Ferreira, Kujawski, Brancher e Gonçalves (BKBG) Attorneys at Law, a full corporate practice law firm established in São Paulo, Brazil (www.bkbg.com.br). His main areas of expertise include mergers and acquisitions, general contract law, corporate law, environmental law and commercial arbitration.

Eduardo is currently the chairman of the Brazilian Committee on Arbitration (CBAR - www.cbar.org.br), a highly respected institution comprising Brazilian and international arbitration specialists focused on the development of arbitration in Brazil. He is also a member of the French Arbitration Committee, the ICC Latin American Arbitration Group, the International Arbitration Institute (IAI), a member of the board of the Arbitation Center for AMCHAM (SP), and he will be the co-chair of the 2010 ICCA conference in Rio de Janeiro.

He is also listed as an arbitrator before several domestic arbitration institutions and has acted as counsel, co-arbitrator and chairman of arbitration tribunals in a variety of international and domestic arbitrations under ICC rules and domestic arbitration institutions in matters involving e-commerce, telecommunications, satellites, construction agreements, energy, corporate, distributions, and share purchase agreements, among others. He is the author of several articles on arbitration and has extensive experience as a speaker at conferences both in Brazil and abroad.

Eduardo was educated at the Law School of the University of São Paulo and at the University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) where he obtained a Master's degree (DEA/1997) in private international law with emphasis on arbitration under the coordination of the late professor Philippe Fouchard. He was also a visiting scholar at Boston University. Eduardo speaks Portuguese, English, French and Spanish and has a good knowledge of Italian.