The number of new processes for partial dissolution of a company — when a partner leaves the company — reached 889 from the beginning of 2026 until the month of April. Factors ranging from the economic scenario to generational changes in company leadership explain a scenario of increase in corporate disputes across the country.
“The vast majority of actions of this nature — verification of assets, exclusion of partners, rendering of accounts, holding administrators responsible, annulment of meetings, abuse of the controller — have grown in the last five years.
The exception is the dissolution – partial and total – of a company, which suffered a decline in the year 2023,” says partner at NHM Advogados, Eduardo Terashima.
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From 2023, when 2,008 disputes involving dissolutions reached the Court, until 2024, with 2,049 new cases registered, the growth was just 2%. In 2025, they reached 2,467, an increase of 20% compared to the previous year. It turns out that, since 2020, when this number was 1,484, it has never been below 2,000 new cases per year.
Recent conflicts such as the case of partners, one of the largest fashion companies in Brazil, shed light on a more structural context of corporate conflicts in Brazil.
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“The Brazilian business market is experiencing a period of intense judicialization and litigation in the corporate environment”, points out the legal manager and partner at Tahech Advogados, Laura Isabel Nogarolli. “The combination of economic instability with the maturation of governance mechanisms has caused the number of disagreements between control blocks, minority shareholders and company founders to explode,” he says.
Economy and generation exchanges help explain the scenario
Experts consulted by InfoMoney agree that maintaining high interest rates in Brazil for a long period is one of the problems. “Sustained high Selic rate and financial stress. Leveraged companies reduce dividends, demand contributions that the minority does not follow, fight over cash allocation. Disgruntled minority partner is the typical protagonist of the calculation of assets”, points out Terashima.
The lawyer lists at least five other factors that impact the scenario: one of them is the transition to the second or third generation of family businesses founded in the 1980s and 1990s. They cause the dispersion of inheritance among shareholders with incompatible profiles and horizons, explains Terashima, often producing corporate conflicts.
Furthermore, after a boom in venture capital between 2020 and 2021, in which companies reached high valuations, the financing market for startups entered a drought that produced capital restructurings and changes of control. In court, this type of issue takes 1 to 3 years to be resolved, leading to processes that are still seen today.
The CNJ data only includes cases of partial dissolution of the company, when a partner requests to leave or is dismissed from the company. Large corporations, however, tend to prefer the arbitration or mediation route: “It’s the preferred route to the top of the market — joint-stock companies and Mergers and Acquisitions contracts. It’s quick and technical, but it’s cost-prohibitive for small companies”, explains Nogarolli.
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Data from the “Mediation in Numbers” report, carried out in collaboration with FGV Direito, shows that corporate law occupied the majority of cases that reached arbitration chambers in Brazil in 2024.
In Justice, recent changes in legislation are cited as some factors that may also have contributed to the scenario of corporate conflicts. Law 14,451/2022, for example, reduced the quorum for structuring deliberations in limited companies, such as changes to the articles of incorporation, merger, incorporation and dissolution.
“This allowed a simple majority to approve relevant issues in society and, eventually, allowing over time a reorganization of minority shareholders to obtain a simple majority, something simpler than a qualified majority”, explains the founding partner of Bruno Boris Advogados, Bruno Boris.
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