Team size: 4

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

The defining work of the past year has been leading the legal dimension of a group-wide debt restructuring, initiated in 2024 and still under way. Centred mainly on the Courts of Milan and Madrid, it involves overall debt of more than €400 million and a large number of financial institutions and investors.

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

My approach rests on a conviction formed over years of ownership and management change: in a crisis the rules do not disappear — they have to be re-read, with critical thinking and pragmatic, problem-solving creativity. Three things follow. Trust and transparency: results in uncertain times come from being a credible, straight interlocutor for the board, management and external stakeholders alike, including putting one’s own uncertainties on the table. Balance: instability forces a constant calibration between the legitimate needs of the company and the protection of third parties, and the legal function is where that balance has to be found. Team and goal alignment: no one navigates far alone, nor achieves much relying on their own forces; much of leadership, and of reaching the goal, is mobilising a group of individuals and making them a team — whose competence and motivation raise the whole organisation’s resilience.

What do you think is the greatest innovation you have enacted in the past year?

The innovation worth highlighting is having moved the legal function’s use of artificial intelligence from experiment to operating model: taking repetitive, non-core work off the team, rebalancing our reliance on external counsel, and strengthening in-house know-how on genuinely strategic issues.

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

Increasingly, it is the importance of giving back. I serve as an Ambassador for Banco Alimentare, Italy’s leading organisation against food poverty and waste, and I volunteer with Progetto Arca, supporting homeless and vulnerable people. Two ideas connect these. The first is that food is close to medicine — for people, through better nutrition, and for the planet, through less waste — which is why food poverty and sustainability belong together for me. The second is that the capabilities we build in our careers are worth most when they prove useful beyond them.

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

To me, being strategic is the opposite of being the final checkpoint. It is the discipline of understanding the real need behind the request — the business asks for a contract when the actual issue is a risk it has not yet seen — and addressing that, not just the question on the surface. It is also the ability to translate: between legal and business, headquarters and local context, the board and operating reality, saying not only what the rule is but what it means for the decision at hand. Strategy, in-house, is less about grand plans than about being trusted in the room when the decisions are actually made, shaping decisions rather than vetting them.