Team size: 5

What are the most significant cases, projects, or transactions that you and your legal team have recently been involved in?

My team has been supporting investment transactions related to the exit of certain shareholders from the company and the currently ongoing D Series fundraising round.

We have been working on several projects related to D-Orbit Distributed Space programme and specifically delivered support to drawing up and negotiating the relevant contractual documentation, including licensing agreements.

My team is dedicating significant resources to contribute to shaping the regulatory framework for conducting space activities by non-governmental actors, critical for the realisation of D-Orbit’s vision and business roadmap. Since the release by the European Commission of the draft EU Space Act Regulation in June 2025 D-Orbit’s Regulatory Strategy team has been committed to provide meaningful feedback to improve the draft by providing the most comprehensive review via the public consultation and interfacing directly with the relevant stakeholders to provide rationale for the proposed amendments and feedback to the draft. In parallel, given that Italy has adopted its national space law and initiated the work on the implementing decree and the underlying technical requirements regulations, D-Orbit has been providing the relevant input directly to the government and via industrial associations such as AIPAS. We have also co-led the consortium with Astroscale and ClearSpace having won the bid for the Regulatory Sandbox for Rendezvous and Proximity Operations with the participation of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the United Kingdom Space Agency (phase 1 report; phase 2 report should be published by the end of the summer), with the aim to provide DSIT, the UK Space Agency and the CAA with a list of actionable recommendations to make the UK the place of choice for licensing RPO missions.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

As General Counsel, I approach periods of instability or crisis by focusing on a combination of de-risking, agility, compliance and transparency. My first priority is to identify D-Orbit’s critical activities and ensure that legal risks in those areas are understood, mitigated, and monitored so that operations can continue with minimal disruption. At the same time, I maintain a pragmatic and agile mindset, enabling the legal function to support fast decision-making without compromising compliance or governance standards. Where appropriate, I leverage carefully selected external advisers and service providers to ensure access to specialised expertise and additional capacity while preserving internal control over key decisions. Equally important is transparent collaboration with all relevant functions—operations, finance, sales, IT and leadership—so that risks, priorities, and responsibilities are aligned across the company. In my experience, resilience is built not only through robust legal frameworks, but also through proactive communication, cross-functional cooperation, and the ability to adapt quickly while maintaining trust and accountability.

General counsel often speak of the need to be strategic to reach the pinnacle of the profession. What does being strategic mean to you?

For me, being strategic means involvement in the business decision-making process rather than the role of sorting things out ex-post. At D-Orbit that idea is built into how we structured the function itself: my mandate as General Counsel and VP Regulatory Strategy deliberately combines legal risk management with the job of shaping the rules our industry will operate under, because in a business built on frontier space technology — in-space logistics, in-orbit servicing, circular space economy — reacting to regulation as it lands is already too late. Strategic in-house counsel translate long-horizon signals, such as the proposed EU Space Act Regulation, a shifting export control regime, or an emerging national space law, into decisions the business can act on today, and they measure their value less by the disputes they win than by the ones they avoid because the company was positioned correctly years in advance.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

The lawyers who thrive in-house now are comfortable operating without settled precedent, because in industries like ours the rulebook is still being written. Beyond technical competence, that means genuine commercial fluency, which enables understanding the deal or the mission well enough to advise on the relevant risks, combined with the diplomatic skill to work effectively and efficiently with regulators, shareholders, engineers and the board alike, so that the legal function is recognised as an enabler of the Company’s growth. Another attribute is communication: the skill of turning legal advice into guardrails the rest of the business can actually operate within, rather than a memo only another lawyer can interpret. To close, I would like to mention resilience: the ability to keep advising with confidence while the technology, the market and the regulatory landscape continue to change and evolve, without waiting for certainty that may never arrive.