Team size: 3

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

Over the past year, my work has focused primarily on buy-side M&A across a significant Italian renewable energy portfolio, including solar, wind and battery energy storage (BESS) projects. I have managed several acquisitions in parallel, coordinating legal and technical due diligence with external counsel and specialist advisers. Project names and counterparties are confidential.

Alongside transactional work, I have been heavily involved in regulatory and development matters, particularly grid connection procedures, connection amendments and disputes with the grid operator, as well as permitting and environmental authorisation processes. One of the year’s highlights was obtaining a favourable ruling from the Council of State that overturned a negative environmental assessment, allowing a previously stalled project to move forward.

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

The renewable energy sector is characterised by constant regulatory change, evolving market conditions and increasingly complex permitting frameworks. In this environment, resilience depends on anticipating legal risks rather than simply reacting to them.

My approach is to work closely with the investment, development and technical teams from the earliest stages of a project, ensuring legal considerations are embedded into commercial decision-making. Clear risk assessment, practical advice and continuous communication allow the business to adapt quickly while maintaining compliance and protecting long-term value.

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

A modern in-house lawyer must combine strong technical expertise with commercial awareness. Legal advice is most valuable when it helps the business make informed decisions rather than simply identifying risks.

Equally important are adaptability, collaboration and the ability to communicate complex legal issues in a practical and accessible way. As the regulatory environment becomes more dynamic, in-house counsel must be proactive, solution-oriented and capable of balancing legal protection with business objectives.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

The pace of regulatory change affecting the energy transition continues to accelerate. For renewable energy developers, success increasingly depends not only on transactional expertise but also on a deep understanding of permitting, environmental regulation and grid access.

I also see a growing expectation for legal teams to act as strategic business partners. In-house lawyers are increasingly involved in investment decisions, project development and risk management from the outset, requiring a multidisciplinary approach and close collaboration across functions.

Alongside this, I’m watching how legal teams adopt AI tools in a genuinely productive way. Used well, AI can help in-house counsel manage the volume of regulatory tracking, due diligence review and contract analysis that comes with a large project portfolio, freeing up time for the higher-value strategic work I mentioned above. The lawyers who get the most out of it are the ones who treat it as a way to work faster and more rigorously, not as a substitute for legal judgement – the human review and sign-off still matter enormously, especially in a regulatory environment that changes as quickly as ours does.