Career biography

Camilla Cocuzza is Associate Vice President – General Counsel of the Italy Hub of Eli Lilly and Company, sitting on the Italy Hub Leadership Team. She leads the Legal function across 19 countries, from Italy to the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania and Israel. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of Eli Lilly Italia S.p.A.

A firm believer in innovation and simplification, she works to make legal support more strategic, clearer and closer to the business, including through the use of artificial intelligence.

Admitted to the Bar in both Italy and New York, Camilla joined Lilly in 2018. During her tenure at Lilly, she spent 18 months in Indianapolis as a global brand attorney in the cardiometabolic area before returning to lead the legal function of the Italy Hub. Earlier in her career she spent close to a decade in private practice at international firms in Milan and New York, including Cleary Gottlieb, Allen & Overy, Seyfarth Shaw and Orrick.

She graduated in law from Bocconi University and holds an LL.M. in International Business Regulation, Litigation and Arbitration from New York University. Her work covers primarily pharmaceutical regulation, corporate criminal liability, competition, compliance, commercial transactions and litigation.

Camilla speaks often on pharmaceutical and healthcare topics. She gave the keynote speech at the recent AIJA seminar “From Code to Care” in Florence (2026). She has taken part in panels including a Bocconi Alumni roundtable on access to medicines and the use of AI across Europe (2026), an AmCham roundtable on pharmaceutical payback in Rome (2026), and the GC Summit Italy on the general counsel’s role under the NIS-2 Directive (2025). She has also lectured on compassionate use at the La Sapienza Master in Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Law in Rome (2025) and spoken on synthetic data in healthcare (2024).

[In 2026 she was featured in TopLegal’s LeadHer 100, a recognition of the women shaping the Italian legal market, run with the La Carica delle 101 network. In 2025 she was named In-House Counsel of the Year for the Chemical, Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences sector at the InhouseCommunity Awards, and she had already been featured in the Legal 500 GC Powerlist Italy in 2024.] feel free to remove this paragraph if too long / not aligned with Legal500 style.

She is curious about where science and law meet and about making things possible in the right and ethical way. Her commitment to the life sciences industry is personal. Medicine once saved the life of a very close relative, and that experience still shapes how she sees the purpose of her work.