The Specialist: How JL Soares Became One of Latin America’s Most Sought-After Minds in Civil Counterintelligence

Shaped by a dramatic personal battle involving organized crime, his field-tested “Strategic Doctrine” is now drawing attention beyond Brazil’s borders.

In Latin America, where legal uncertainty, emotional intensity, and criminal interference often collide, traditional dispute methods fall short. Resolution here demands more than protocol; it takes strategy, precision, and intelligence.

For José Lemes Soares, known to most as JL, the path to becoming the region’s leading voice in Civil Counterintelligence didn’t begin in a courtroom. It started at home.

As founder and chief strategist of Perseu Counterintelligence, JL is now a recognized reference in the field, advising high-net-worth families, multinationals, and legal teams across Brazil, the U.S., and Europe. His edge? A hybrid doctrine of intelligence, behavioral profiling, and strategic architecture, forged not in theory, but in crisis.

A War That Found Him

Before founding Perseu, JL Soares was running his family’s transportation business. That changed when a criminal network targeted a vulnerable relative.

With legal tools proving too slow and ineffective, he took matters into his own hands, personally leading a multi-agency operation to protect his mother, dismantle the threat, and secure the family estate.

It wasn’t just a personal win. It was what he calls his “baptism by fire.”

“I realized that relying solely on standard legal defense was a losing strategy against an enemy that operated outside the rules,” he later reflected. “To protect my mother and preserve our legacy, I had to build a private intelligence operation from scratch.”

That real-life operation would become what Soares now calls “Case Zero”, a foundational event, later documented in a short documentary on Perseu’s website, that sparked the creation of a new discipline: Civil Counterintelligence.

Engineering Resolution

Unlike conventional lawyers or consultants, Soares doesn’t see conflicts in black-and-white terms. Where most see legal filings and financial statements, he sees asymmetric power structures, psychological triggers, and invisible networks of influence. His signature framework, known inside Perseu as the Strategic Doctrine,is built to decode and dismantle those forces.

“The boundary between the impossible and the resolved is not defined by luck,” he says. “It is defined by strategy.”

That strategy now drives operations across multiple sectors, from inheritance disputes and M&A deadlocks to cyber forensics and investor crises.

Soares calls himself an “Operational Architect,” personally leading the diagnostic phase of complex cases before mobilizing his multidisciplinary team of legal partners, behavioral experts, and ethical hackers to execute high-stakes interventions.

Success Behind the Curtain

While many of Perseu’s most impactful operations remain sealed under strict NDAs, a few have reached public attention and helped define Soares’s reputation:

The “Luxury Car Dealership” Sting

A viral case in Brazil in which Soares exposed a fraudulent car dealership tied to organized crime in just hours. Accompanied by a congressman, his team mapped the hidden ownership structure and neutralized the scheme before traditional investigators even arrived on scene.

Unlocking the Unoeste Deal

When legal teams stalled over a unanimity clause during the restructuring of one of Brazil’s most prominent educational institutions, Soares intervened. He identified a psychological gatekeeper at the heart of the deadlock, applied targeted displacement tactics, and cleared the path for the multimillion-dollar deal to close.

Cross-Border Crisis Management

From probing the corporate web behind the Blaze platform in the Netherlands to advising a major Coca-Cola shareholder in the U.S., Soares’s team has operated discreetly in international theaters where the stakes, and the silence, are equally high.

These public cases offer only a glimpse into a portfolio where the most critical victories remain confidential by design.

The Man Behind the Method

Though now known for intelligence work, Soares’s early foundation was far from covert. He studied at Gordonstoun School in Scotland, a prestigious academy known for shaping world leaders, an experience that, he says, taught him to stay focused under pressure.

“Gordonstoun isn’t just academics,” he explains. “It’s about staying calm while chaos swirls around you.”

But his real education came later, in the midst of a personal crisis, where he had to apply digital forensics, behavioral profiling, and legal strategy in real time, not in theory, but on the frontlines.

Not Just a Business, a Doctrine

Perseu’s operations are guided by a principle Soares calls the “Doctrine of Just Engagement.” He only accepts missions where there is a legitimate imbalance or injustice that can be corrected, never for vanity or vengeance.

He also rejects single-lens thinking.

“Where a lawyer sees a lawsuit and a financial advisor sees a spreadsheet, I see a theater of asymmetric operations,” he explains. “My job is to engineer resolution where others see stalemate.”

He describes himself as a strategist and steward, someone who replaces chaos with clarity, offering clients not just protection but peace of mind.

Looking Ahead

With operations active in both hemispheres, Soares is now focusing on authorship. His upcoming book, The 38 Laws of Strategic Counterintelligence, aims to make this complex doctrine accessible to the broader public, not just CEOs and lawyers.

“The same principles that neutralize sabotage in a boardroom,” he says, “can help a family protect their legacy, or an individual navigate a toxic conflict.”

His goal is to leave behind not just a successful business, but an intellectual legacy, a strategic manual for those facing the kind of high-stakes situations that most professionals aren’t equipped to handle.

A New Discipline Is Born

Civil Counterintelligence, as defined by Soares, is the application of state-level intelligence strategies to private, often emotional, disputes. It’s a field that didn’t formally exist a decade ago. Now, it’s becoming indispensable.

From family empires on the verge of collapse to corporations trapped in deadlock, JL Soares has carved out a role that defies easy categorization: part crisis commander, part forensic architect, part psychological chessmaster.

And in doing so, he’s built more than a firm.

He’s built a discipline.

About the Author

Hollie McKay, an independent war reporter and author of Only Cry for the Living, spent 14+ years covering conflict zones for major outlets, embedding with troops and interviewing survivors, terrorists, and officials globally, and then transitioned to freelance investigative writing on war, terrorism, and human rights crises.