Company anniversary video: how I told the 20 years of Medina Guimarães Advogados through a concept

The last scene takes place in an empty library. The pencil sharpener sits still on the table, the worn-down pencil beside it, and through the window you can see a motorcycle. A hand writes a sentence on a piece of paper, and the camera chooses not to show what was written. Before that, the narration has already said: "Over time, we begin to understand that interpreting the law… is, deep down, learning to listen." This line holds the 20th anniversary film of Medina Guimarães Advogados together from the first shot to the last. It is what allowed me to tell two decades of a law firm without asking the audience to memorize dates.

Medina Guimarães Advogados: from Maringá to Brasília, Curitiba, Florianópolis and São Paulo

Medina Guimarães states on its own website that it has been practicing since 1995, the year José Miguel Garcia Medina began practicing law. In 2005 the partnership with Rafael de Oliveira Guimarães was born, initially with the two lawyers. The headquarters is in Maringá, on Avenida Doutor Gastão Vidigal, and from there the firm gradually spread across the map of the country.

The São Paulo office, on Rua Haddock Lobo, opened in the year the firm turned 20. Migalhas's report on the opening, in September 2025, mentions more than 30 staff members spread across the country. Around the same time, Análise Editorial recorded that the firm practiced in 14 areas of law, led by civil and business law, appellate litigation, financial markets, tax and corporate law.

Behind these numbers is a biography that commands respect. According to the official website, Professor Medina was a member of the Commission of Jurists appointed by the Federal Senate to draft the bill that gave rise to the 2015 Code of Civil Procedure, received the Jabuti Prize in 2009 for the book "Execução" (Enforcement) and is an associate professor of Civil Procedure at the State University of Maringá. Rafael Guimarães holds a doctorate and a master's degree in Civil Procedure from PUC/SP. You can find the full presentation on the Medina Guimarães website.

REC Mart's invitation for the company anniversary video

This film came to me through REC Mart, Ton Dijan's production company here in Maringá. I met REC through a referral from Terra and Talita, friends in the field, and was welcomed so naturally that I was soon sitting with the team, listening to the stories of the brands and the people. After the first piece was approved on the first round, Ton started calling me for other projects. My gratitude to him grows with every film, because few production companies treat the script as seriously as REC does.

A law firm turning 20 calls for a text worthy of the house. The sobriety of legal practice, the partners' academic depth and the national expansion needed to fit in a film people would want to watch to the end.

There was a base script: the starting point of the video for a law firm

When I joined the project, there was a base script. It told the firm's path in chronological order, with the years of expansion, the introduction of Professor Medina, the Code of Civil Procedure, the Jabuti, the practice areas, reenactments and aerial shots of the state capitals. It was an honest map of everything the firm wanted to see preserved in the film, and I read it with gratitude, because good groundwork saves weeks of research.

With this map in hand, I asked the question I usually ask about any company anniversary: what idea explains why this story happened the way it did? The dates show when the firm arrived in each city, and the script also needed to find the reason, the thing that repeats with each arrival and that the team recognizes in its daily work.

Listening and interpreting: the concept that organizes the 20 years

The concept came from the craft itself. Interpreting the law requires listening, and those who listen carefully begin to perceive what the text of the law leaves implicit. The narration says this in two sentences that complete each other: "Over time, we begin to understand that interpreting the law… is, deep down, learning to listen." And right after: "And those who truly listen, at some point, begin to see what is not written."

To this concept I added a second idea, that of preparation. The firm grows because it prepares before the opportunity appears, and the script places this conviction in front of the map of Brazil: "Every city we have reached, we reached because we prepared to get there." With listening and preparation as the thread, the expansion to Brasília, Curitiba, Florianópolis and São Paulo gains meaning within the scene, and the dates can stay on the website, where the audience can look them up whenever they want.

The script ended up with four scenes and fourteen shots, with camera, lighting and sound described shot by shot. The voices are concentrated in Professor Medina and Rafael Guimarães. The story of the partner who started out carrying documents from one place to another got a date, "Maringá, 1998", and a sentence that condenses it: "He started out carrying documents from one place to another… without knowing that, one day, his own name would be on the door."

Culture in images: architecture, years of service and MG Academy

The third scene of the script is called "What holds all this up". In it, culture appears in images. The camera travels through the architecture of the headquarters, with a Seville-inspired staircase, a glass walkway referencing the Pinacoteca and a skylight. It finds people with many years at the firm and hears a sentence that says a lot about the environment: "Here, there are people who have been around for more than ten years. And there are people who left... and wanted to come back." It passes through MG Academy, the cafeteria and the highly complex banking cases, and ends with the headquarters lit up at night.

I like to think of this scene as an emotional inventory. Each image silently answers a question that clients and future staff members ask before trusting a law firm: how this house treats knowledge, time and people.

How to choose the concept for your company's 20th anniversary video

Imagine that your company is about to turn 10, 20 or 30 and that the film will open the celebration, run on the website and be sent to clients. The first step I suggest is to look at the work your team does every day and ask which gesture of that work explains the whole story. In the case of a law firm, the gesture was interpreting. In a manufacturing company it might be measuring, in a school it might be teaching, in a retail chain it might be serving.

Once the gesture is found, the script chooses images that show it happening and lets the anniversary facts appear inside them: an old photo, a facade, a map. The audience leaves the film remembering one idea and two or three images, and that is what they will repeat when they talk about your brand. The full case is in the Medina Guimarães section of the REC Mart case study.

In the next article about Medina Guimarães, I explain how Rui Barbosa and a motorcycle courier open the film, and why a serious brand also needs a hook in the first few seconds.