Our team
Benedita Sampaio
Nunes
LAWYER-LINGUIST
Benedita was raised in Brussels, where she initiated her law studies at Université Libre de Bruxelles. Subsequently, she moved to Lisbon, where she earned her law degree from the Faculty of Law of Universidade Católica Portuguesa in 2011. During these studies, she was awarded a merit scholarship and academic honours for top performances.
Her penchant for litigation and procedural matters led her to choose civil and commercial arbitration as an optional subject. She pursued this interest in her LLM at the London School of Economics and Political Science by enrolling in Prof. Dr. Jan Kleinheisterkamp’s international commercial arbitration class, alongside intellectual property, cyberlaw and corporate finance classes.
Upon graduating from her LLM with Distinction, Benedita returned to Lisbon and joined the litigation and arbitration team at a top tier Portuguese law firm, Morais Leitão. While at Morais Leitão, Benedita gained significant experience as counsel in complex cases related to different sectors and industries (including energy, construction, pharmaceutical, insurance, automotive and fashion). She also provided tailored advice to Francophone clients, as a member of the French desk, and co-founded Team Genesis, a specialised team of lawyers dedicated to advising emerging companies throughout their life cycle.
In 2016, seeking to broaden her professional horizons, Benedita began working as an independent advisor. Since then, among other activities, notably within the media industry, she has co-founded Cross Legal and advised clients in international business transactions and in ad hoc and institutional arbitration cases. In 2019, she started working with Prof. Dr. Jan Kleinheisterkamp as arbitral tribunal secretary. In 2021, she also assumed the role of director of impact and legal affairs for Slowness, a pioneering German group in the hospitality sector with projects in Portugal, among other countries.
She is admitted to the Portuguese Bar Association and registered as a lawyer since 2015.
Benedita works daily in Portuguese, English and French.
Catarina Granadeiro
LAWYER-LINGUIST
Catarina graduated in Law from the Faculty of Law of Universidade Católica Portuguesa in 2011 and subsequently completed her LLM at Georgetown University in Washington DC with a focus on Commercial and Corporate Law.
She began her professional career in the New York office of Simpson Thacher and Bartlett as an International Associate in the capital markets department. That same year she became a Lawyer in the State of New York by successfully completing the New York Bar Exam.
She then worked for three years in the Lisbon office of Uría Menendez, Proença de Carvalho, where she worked in the M&A, Litigation, Public Law and Banking and Finance departments. She has been a member of the Portuguese Bar Association since 2016.
At the same time, she began teaching at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon as a guest lecturer in Comparative Law and the Law of Obligations and is also a researcher at the Private Law Research Centre. She currently teaches on several postgraduate courses. She has authored several legal books and articles.
In 2016 she started working at the Bank of Portugal in the Regulatory Policy Area of the Financial Stability Department. In this context, she participated in the negotiation of various legislative packages for the sector and in the production of secondary standards for the European Banking Authority. She is currently Chairman of the General Meeting of Novabase, S.A. and works as a legal advisor for a leading bank in the Portuguese market.
Her working languages are English, in which she has a Proficiency Diploma (European Level C2) and Spanish, in which she has a DELE C2 Diploma (Avanzado).
With a specialty in Banking and Financial Law, Catarina tries to be up to date with trending topics in the legal world whilst seeking her constant professional growth.