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

Commercial law at the intersection of technology and business transformation in the IT industry is where I have chosen to build my career – and right now, especially at Cisco, that space has never been more demanding or more interesting.

I am part of Cisco’s Sales Legal organisation, a team dedicated to commercial contract negotiations with customers and partners and broadly providing support across Cisco’s go-to-market strategy. In particular, my team’s remit focuses on specific business across the EMEA South region.

Our most significant work over the past year has centred on supporting negotiations with major customers in transactions involving deploying network infrastructure and security solutions for the AI era. These are complex, multi-layered transactions spanning licensing agreements, SaaS terms, security, privacy and (increasingly) AI-specific contractual provisions – each requiring careful navigation of both commercial and regulatory dimensions.

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

Resilience in legal, to me, comes from holding two things together: the discipline of clear process and the freedom and capability to adapt when circumstances demand it.

My starting point is always process: having clear frameworks in place before a crisis hits, so that when pressure arrives, the team is ready rather than reactive.

But established process only takes you so far. The legal challenges we face today are genuinely different from those of a few years ago, and the same will be true going forward. AI terms, privacy obligations, new commercial risk dimensions have fundamentally changed what sophisticated legal work looks like. Staying ahead of that requires a team that is genuinely committed to continuous learning – one that treats every new challenge not as a disruption but as an opportunity to grow. That culture of adaptability is what ultimately makes a legal team resilient.

What is a cause, business or otherwise, that you are passionate about? Why is this?

Using our legal skills to give back to our community is what gives the profession a broader sense of purpose – one I carry alongside the commercial work we do every day.

Cisco’s Pro Bono programme encourages Legal team members to volunteer their expertise to individuals and organisations, supporting causes that our teams are passionate about (access to justice, immigration, legal awareness, and more). What makes it unique is that Cisco actively supports us in dedicating company time to it. That is not common, and I don’t take it for granted.

As Pro Bono Ambassador for Italy, I have the privilege of leading our Pro Bono efforts here, where we have found meaningful ways to contribute despite the constraints that in-house lawyers are subject to under Italian law as compared to our colleagues in private practice. Achieving 100% team participation – every single member contributing – continuously in the past years is the result I am most proud of in this role.

What strategies do you employ to ensure the successful digital transformation of a legal department while maintaining compliance with your country’s data protection laws?

We are deliberately integrating AI into how our team works: in practice, this means rethinking how we approach contract review, research and day-to-day legal workflow, with the ultimate goal of freeing up the team to focus on the judgement-intensive work that genuinely requires human expertise.

In navigating this strategy, we remain anchored to principles of Transparency, Fairness, Accountability, Privacy, Security and Reliability. These principles, which constitute the foundation of Cisco’s Responsible AI Framework, are all necessary for promoting and enabling safe and trustworthy AI and are designed to ensure close alignment with applicable laws, including data protection laws, which we treat as a foundation and enabler, not as a constraint.

AI can unlock real capacity, but the human must always remain in the loop: reviewing, deciding, and being ultimately accountable. This fosters trust with our internal and external stakeholders and safeguards the quality of our work.