Every year I write the firm’s birthday article. In recent years, inspiration always seemed to find me before I even sat down to write. A story, an experience, an idea that would end up connecting with that particular moment in CMC’s journey. This year was different.

August 2nd was approaching and, through the 30th, I had no idea what to write. Then I woke up on the 31st with a single word in my head: feelings. Ideas started flooding in and I couldn’t fall back asleep. I had to start writing. It’s not an easy subject. Maybe that’s why I decided not to turn to artificial intelligence for this article. It would certainly have been easier – but there is one thing technology still cannot reproduce in a piece of writing: feeling.

For the past three years, I have been living in Madrid with my family. They were important years for me, both personally and professionally. Being away also allows us to see certain things differently. Sometimes, distance is what it takes to recognize the value of what has always been close.

And during those three years, CMC kept growing. We brought on new clients, took part in increasingly relevant and complex transactions, new partners and lawyers joined us, and our partnership grew stronger.

Recently, Alamy and I were in New York together, visiting clients, law firms, and banks, and building new relationships. At certain moments during that trip, I found myself thinking about how remarkable it is that, 16 years on, we are still doing exactly what we have always done: opening doors for the firm.

Perhaps the only reason I was able to spend those three years away is that I was never truly alone on this journey.

At some point, I began to feel that the firm needed my presence. But I also realized that I needed that presence myself. There is an important distinction between needing and depending. Dependence is fragility – it is what happens when a structure cannot hold without one specific piece. Needing is something else entirely. Needing is a choice. It is acknowledging that, even when you are capable of walking alone, you are better when you walk alongside others. After 16 years, I am proud to know that CMC does not depend exclusively on its founders. That may, in fact, be one of our greatest achievements.

The firm has grown in recent years. My partners took on greater responsibilities, our lawyers developed, new clients placed their trust in us, and we continued to work on important and complex matters. CMC has shown that it is larger than any one of us individually. But that does not mean we have stopped needing one another. If anything, it may be the opposite. We need each other in different ways and at different times. In some moments, someone has to hold things together. In others, someone new arrives to bring experience, support, and fresh ideas. And there are moments when we feel it is time to be closer again. My decision to return to Brazil carries a great deal of that feeling. I am not coming back because the firm has not been able to move forward without me. The last three years proved exactly the contrary. I am coming back because I want to be present. I want to be close to my partners and our lawyers. I want to be close to our clients. I want to be part of the conversations, the decisions, the hard moments, and the wins.

Over these 16 years, clients have changed companies and stayed close. Clients have introduced us to other clients. Professional relationships have become personal ones. And people who believed in us have helped, directly or indirectly, to build the firm we are today. When I think about this past year’s achievements, I naturally think about the transactions we closed, the new clients who came to us, the trips, and the new opportunities taking shape. But writing this article, I realize that what matters most to me is not only the achievements themselves.

It is the people and the relationships behind them.

A law firm can be built on technical expertise, hard work, and results. But I do not believe it is possible to build a 16-year story on those things alone. It takes trust, friendship, empathy, generosity, reciprocity – and, above all, feelings.

Last year, when we celebrated our 15th birthday, I wrote about the arrival of adolescence.

Now we are 16.

And when I look at CMC, I see a firm very different from the one we founded. New partners. New lawyers. New clients. More complex transactions. New markets. New projects. New challenges. All of it makes me happy. Because perhaps one of the greatest rewards of building something is realizing, years later, that it no longer belongs only to those who started it.

The CMC of 16 years is no longer the firm we founded.

It is the firm we all built.

Together.

Happy 16th birthday, CMC.