PLMJ has just received the award for Best Portuguese Law Firm, repeating the feat it had already achieved in 2009. The Chambers Europe Awards for Excellence 2012 were given last night in Amsterdam at a ceremony attended by PLMJ partners Nuno Líbano Monteiro, Manuel Santos Vítor and Jorge Brito Pereira. In the words of PLMJ co-managing partner Manuel Santos Vitor, “This award is an appropriate recognition of our journey and our effort to respond in the best way possible to an extremely difficult environment and to the demands of our clients. Looking to the future, and despite all the difficulties, we have no doubt we will rise to any challenges we meet along the way”. This distinction of great international prestige is the result of an evaluation of the legal market and confirmation of the excellent work done by PLMJ in advising on the main transactions and deals that took place in Portugal over the last year. For this very reason, at the end of last night’s ceremony, Manuel Santos Vitor also said, “We are grateful to our clients for having enabled us to reach this point, and for the trust they have placed in us. The challenges we have faced as a result of our clients’ demands and the need for the highest levels of quality have been enormous, but we have managed to respond to these challenges in every respect”. A year of growth and international recognition The choice of PLMJ as Best Portuguese Law Firm is the fruit of a year of great challenges and great conquests, and not only in Portugal. PLMJ has strengthened its international network of partnerships and this award is proof of the excellence of the service provided by PLMJ through all the members of PLMJ International Legal Network, which is already a global benchmark. “The capacity of our lawyers and our support structure in Portugal and in the international network in Luanda, Maputo, and Beijing, etc. to respond to these challenges, has been decisive in winning this award”, said Manuel Santos Vitor at the event honouring Europe’s best lawyers. This Chambers Europe Award for Excellence 2012 is also the culmination of a year in which PLMJ received some of the other most prestigious awards given in the legal market. In October 2011 the Financial Times named PLMJ as the 5th most innovative firm in continental Europe, in the first year that the Portuguese market was analysed by the British newspaper. One month later, highly regarded specialist legal magazine, The Lawyer, named Luís Sáragga Leal as European Managing Partner of the Year, an honour which recognised the career of one of PLMJ’s founders. All these awards have something in common: they recognise the excellence, quality and innovation of the highly specialised legal services provided by PLMJ’s lawyers and, above all, client service and the capacity to add value to our clients’ businesses and activities, both in Portugal and abroad. We are very proud of all these awards which are a clear sign of our credibility and an undisputable recognition of the rigour and quality of service provided by PLMJ’s more than 200 lawyers.