Ordem dos Advogados Reopens Reciprocity Talks with Brazil's OAB After 2023 Termination — 5 June Lisbon Meeting Frames a Return Path for the 4,039 Brazilian Lawyers Already Practicing in Portugal

The Ordem dos Advogados (OAP, Portuguese Bar Association) sat down with a delegation from the Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil (OAB, Brazilian Bar Association) in Lisbon on Thursday 5 June 2026 to negotiate the resumption of the bilateral reciprocity regime that the Portuguese side unilaterally terminated in July 2023. The encontro pulled OAP Bastonário João Massano (in office since the 2025 mandate) and the OAB Conselho Federal's Secretary-General Rose Morais and Special Commission for Lusophone Law president Alessandra Balestieri into the same room — the first formal high-level contact between the two Ordens since the 2023 rupture cut off the automatic Brazilian-lawyer enrolment line and pushed roughly 4,000 incoming Brazilian advogados onto the regular European-qualification path.

What the 2023 rupture actually did

Until July 2023, Brazilian lawyers admitted in good standing to the OAB could move to Portugal and request inscription in the OAP under the bilateral Acordo de Reciprocidade signed in 2009 (republished 2013) — the cooperation instrument that read the Brazilian and Portuguese five-year law degrees plus bar admission as functionally equivalent. The process was light: an OAB good-standing certificate, the Cartão de Identidade Profissional from the Brazilian state-level OAB seccional, a residence permit in Portugal, and a registration fee. No internship, no exam, no requalification. The Brazilian advogado walked out with a Portuguese cédula profissional and full ius postulandi (right to plead) in Portuguese courts.

The OAP's general assembly under then-Bastonária Fernanda de Almeida Pinheiro voted on 21 July 2023 to denounce the reciprocity instrument with effect from the calendar year end. The stated motivation — recorded in the assembly minutes and corroborated by the official communiqué — was that the regime 'did not guarantee equivalent levels of professional qualification and could be used improperly as an indirect access mechanism to the European legal market'. The denunciation cut the automatic enrolment line and pushed every post-2023 incoming Brazilian lawyer onto the regular requalification track: a one-year stage de advocacia (legal internship) under a Portuguese patrono, a prova de agregação (aggregation exam) plus the standard OAP good-standing and ethics screen. The path is the same one Portuguese law graduates and non-EU lawyers from other jurisdictions follow.

The active stock — 4,039 Brazilian lawyers, 13% of the Portuguese bar

The OAP's most recent registo public-roll tape pegs the active Portuguese bar at roughly 32,000 advogados as of late 2025. Brazilian-nationality holders inside that population total 4,039 — 13% of the total bar, the single largest non-Portuguese cohort. The gender split inside the Brazilian-lawyer subset reads 2,301 women and 1,738 men — a substantially more female cohort than the overall Portuguese bar (which sits closer to 52% female). The geographic distribution is concentrated: roughly 60% of the Brazilian-lawyer population is registered in the OAP's Lisboa Conselho Distrital (district council), against Lisbon's roughly 39% share of the bar overall. The remaining 40% spread across Porto, Coimbra and the smaller distritais — Porto and Coimbra each carry low-double-digit shares, the southern and Azores-Madeira distritais carry the residual.

What the 5 June meeting put on the table

The Lisbon agenda — read into the public record through Público Brasil's reporting and the OAB's own communiqué — centred on three working files. The first is a quality-anchored reciprocity instrument that would re-open the automatic-enrolment path while binding the entry to a substantive qualification screen — a written ethics-and-deontology exam, mandatory continuous-professional-development credits, and (under the OAP's preferred frame) a one-time written legal-Portuguese test that the existing 2023 path does not impose. The second is a stage-advocacia symmetry — under the proposed frame Portuguese lawyers seeking inscription in the OAB would walk a comparable Brazilian path, closing the existing asymmetry that the OAB has flagged as a sticking point since the 2023 rupture. The third is a professional-development cooperation envelope on private-international-law, EU law and lusophone-jurisdictions practice — a structural bridge intended to serve both bars without resurrecting the legal-market-access flashpoint that triggered the rupture.

OAB's Rose Morais framed the meeting in conciliatory terms in the post-encontro communiqué: 'The resumption of cooperation between the OAB and the Portuguese Order represents an opportunity to expand the exchange of experiences.' The Portuguese side has not yet released a public read of the talks but has not denied that the working files are on the table. Neither side has set a calendar for the next meeting, but both sides confirmed that working-group contacts will continue.

The litigation backdrop that hovers over the talks

The 2023 termination triggered a wave of litigation in Portuguese administrative courts. CNN Portugal reported in December 2023 that more than 50 actions had been filed against the OAP by Brazilian lawyers contesting the denunciation. The grounds invoked — read across the petitions — centre on the protection of legitimate expectations of lawyers already mid-process at the time of the rupture, the asserted lack of statutory authority of the assembly resolution to terminate a bilateral instrument that the OAP did not sign as a sovereign actor, and the alleged breach of the lusophone-cooperation general principles inscribed in the Constitution. The cases sit in the administrative jurisdiction at various procedural stages; no apex-court ruling has yet landed on the merits. A negotiated re-opening of the reciprocity line — even on stricter terms than 2009 — would defuse most of those actions and reduce the OAP's downstream litigation exposure.

The Lusofonia and CPLP frame

The bilateral OAP-OAB instrument sits inside the broader Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa (CPLP, Community of Portuguese-Language Countries) cooperation architecture and the constitutional protection — Constituição da República Portuguesa Article 7(4) — of lusophone solidarity. The CPLP cooperation file at the legal-profession level is also live with the Cabo Verde, Angola, Moçambique, São Tomé e Príncipe, Guiné-Bissau and Timor-Leste bars; the OAP currently holds full reciprocity instruments with the Cabo Verde and Timor-Leste orders and partial cooperation arrangements with the remaining CPLP states. The 2023 OAB rupture is therefore the only sharp discontinuity in the lusophone cooperation web — a fact the OAB delegation reportedly invoked at the 5 June meeting.

What this means for residents and expats

• If you are a Brazilian lawyer currently in the 2023+ requalification path: Your stage de advocacia under a Portuguese patrono and your prova de agregação calendar are unaffected by the 5 June talks — no instrument has been signed. Any new reciprocity regime that emerges will not have retroactive effect on already-initiated requalification paths unless explicitly so stated.
• If you are a Brazilian lawyer who registered with the OAP before July 2023: Your inscription stands. The rupture was not retroactive on already-granted cédulas.
• If you are a Brazilian lawyer considering a move to Portugal: The current path — stage plus exam plus residence permit — remains the binding regime for any inscription request lodged after 1 January 2024. A new instrument, if signed, would supersede the regime, but a six-to-twelve-month implementation lag from political agreement to operational opening is the realistic floor.
• If you are a Portuguese lawyer with Brazilian clients or matters: The talks signal a more accommodating bilateral environment going forward — the working-group cooperation envelope explicitly covers private-international-law and lusophone-jurisdictions cross-border practice, which would smooth co-counsel arrangements and arbitration referrals.
• If you are a Portuguese-resident foreign national in any matter that needs Portuguese legal representation: The Portuguese bar's load of practising lawyers — 32,000 active advogados, 13% of whom are Brazilian — is the deepest part of the legal market in continental Europe by per-capita measure (32 advogados per 10,000 inhabitants, against EU averages closer to 22 per 10,000). The reciprocity talks, whatever the outcome, do not affect that market depth.

The next checkpoint

Neither bar has published a calendar for the next round. The OAP general-assembly cycle would, on past practice, take any draft instrument to an assembly vote — the 2023 termination went the same procedural route, and any new bilateral instrument would need to clear the same body. The OAB Conselho Federal cycle is broadly aligned. Realistic working horizon for a signed instrument: late 2026 to mid-2027. The Brazilian state-level OAB seccionais will be the second-stage consultees and may push for tighter or looser parameters depending on the seccional. The instrument would also need clearance from the relevant Portuguese government chair — historically the Ministério da Justiça (Ministry of Justice) does not formally approve OAP bilateral instruments, but the ministry has been a quiet stakeholder on prior cycles given the cross-border professional-services implications.

For the 4,039 Brazilian lawyers already on the OAP roll, the headline is that nothing changes on their existing cédula. For the next generation of Brazilian lawyers considering Portugal as a destination, the 5 June Lisbon meeting opens a window — narrower than the pre-2023 regime but materially wider than the current full-requalification path — that the next twelve to twenty-four months will determine.