The law firm Norton Rose Fulbright has expanded its operations to Brazil, with the opening of a Rio office.

The firm has hired Andrew Haynes, who was most recently assistant general counsel at BP, the energy giant, to lead the team alongside Glenn Faas.

Faas was most recently the NRF managing partner in Bogota, Colombia, where he specialised in energy and mining. He previously worked in a predecessor of the firm, McLeod Dixon’s Russian practice, as well as in Venezuela and Kazakhstan.

Haynes oversaw BP’s global M&A legal work, after joining the company in 2003 from British Gas. Before this he was a corporate lawyer at Herbert Smith.

The Rio office is NRF’s third Latin American operation after Bogota and Caracas. Head of Latin America Elisabeth Eljuri says: “Our Brazil practice will play a key part in our strategy to target mandates across Latin America, including the ‘Southern Cone’ of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Paraguay, and to capture intra-Latin American transactional work.”