August Enters the Brazilian Market With Lobo de Rizzo

When a law firm adopts AI, the usual sequence is to buy a product, roll it out, and wait to see whether anyone uses it. Lobo de Rizzo went about it differently, and over the last six months more than 90 people across the firm have built more than 100 working agents on August, none of them written by an outside vendor or configured by a consultancy. The people who built them are the attorneys and staff who already understand the firm’s matters, its clients, and the way it works.

That authorship is the part worth dwelling on, because it reflects what we are actually trying to build. August functions less like software a firm subscribes to and more like a place where its lawyers make things.

Why Lobo de Rizzo chose August

Lobo de Rizzo is a full-service firm advising domestic and international companies across more than 20 practice areas, in Portuguese, under Brazilian law, working from precedent and templates it has been refining since 2007. A general-purpose AI tool has no way to absorb any of that, and the situation is not much better on a platform where every new use case has to go back to the vendor as a request.

What the firm wanted was something its own lawyers could build on, which in practice means a platform that adapts to local statutes, disclosure rules, and document standards rather than asking a Brazilian M&A team to work the way a London or New York team does.

An agent factory staffed by the firm’s own lawyers

Led by Fernanda Marinho, the firm’s Director of Innovation and Efficiency, Lobo de Rizzo launched Fábrica de Agentes, or Agent Factory, a program that moves people across the firm into building their own AI agents.

The interesting part of the numbers is less the volume than who produced it. Builders range from junior associates through to partners across practice groups, and each of them went after the repetitive tasks, review patterns, and drafting bottlenecks they deal with directly.

The deployment itself followed the sequence we use at every firm: our engineers and attorneys worked with Lobo de Rizzo to identify where AI would land first and where it would expand next, we co-developed August around the firm’s own precedent, templates, and drafting standards, and then we rolled it out across the firm and stayed on to keep building.

What happened after that is what distinguishes this rollout. A lawyer at Lobo de Rizzo who identifies a task worth automating can now create and run the workflow without coming back to us, which means the expertise involved ends up encoded in something the whole firm can reuse, and it stays with the firm rather than with a vendor.

“The “AI First” mindset redefines legal work, as it leads us to question how the legal profession would be structured if artificial intelligence had been available from the very beginning. This impacts our business model, the way we develop our people, and how we serve clients. It is a cultural and strategic transformation. In addition to efficiency, we seek to promote greater excellence and creativity in our work.”

Fernanda Marinho — Director of Innovation and Efficiency, Lobo de Rizzo

Training by persona, adoption by competition

Promoting more than 90 people into agent builders takes more than enthusiasm, so Fernanda Marinho designed a training program that meets each group where it works, with Fernanda de Paiva Leite, Senior Efficiency and Innovation Analyst, coordinating the rollout across the firm.

Junior staff move through a structured, multi-session agentic AI curriculum that takes them from first login to shipping working agents.

Partners receive individualized sessions on strategic value extraction, covering how to direct AI as a business tool rather than simply operate it. These run through the firm’s “Partners Academy,” alongside business development and people leadership, which signals that directing AI is now treated as a core partner skill.

The firm also built a gamification model that scores and rewards its most active agent builders, which turned building into something people competed over rather than complied with, and it worked well enough that Lobo de Rizzo extended the scoring to general platform usage. The result reads more like a leaderboard people want to climb than an adoption dashboard tracking reluctant logins.

What the firm is getting back

August recorded nearly 25,000 interactions across the firm’s legal team in the first two months. In the qualitative feedback, one theme comes up repeatedly: attorneys describe the platform as saving their days, which is the kind of thing lawyers tend to say about tools that hand back hours they had already written off rather than about software they were instructed to adopt.

The business case follows from those hours. Time returned to a practice group becomes capacity, whether that means matters the firm can take on without adding headcount, work it can price differently, or more time with clients on the judgment they are paying for in the first place. That is the outcome we are building toward, rather than lawyers doing the same work marginally faster than before.

What Brazil means for August

“Brazil has been one of the most sophisticated legal markets across the globe and has been at the cutting edge of prior legal innovation waves. We’ve been able to work with Lobo de Rizzo and build custom agents for the Brazilian market, expanding across various practice areas and building tools specifically for the region.”

Rutvik Rau — CEO, August

The regional specificity in that last point matters. Lobo de Rizzo joins firms across five continents building on August, among them Hughes Hubbard & Reed, which deployed the platform firmwide across legal practice areas and core business functions, and Hicksons in Australia. What each of them builds differs considerably, which is the natural consequence of firms practicing differently from one another.

About August

August is the execution layer for legal work. The company partners with innovative law firms to productize their practice areas, equipping their lawyers to build custom agents on the firm’s own precedent and standards, and to power co-branded direct-to-client delivery in areas including venture financing, construction, and insurance defense. Founded in 2023 by Columbia classmates Rutvik Rau, Thomas Bueler-Faudree, and Joseph Parker, August is headquartered in New York City. To learn more, visit august.law.

About Lobo de Rizzo

Lobo de Rizzo is a full-service Brazilian law firm founded in 2007, with offices in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It employs more than 200 lawyers and staff and advises domestic and international companies across more than 20 practice areas, including M&A and Capital Markets, where it ranks among Brazil’s top 10 legal advisors of the last five years.