24 www.lawyer-monthly.com Lawyer Monthly Legal Awards 2024 White-collar crime cases often involve complex ethical considerations. How do you navigate these challenges while maintaining your commitment to justice and fairness? It is far from being easy, and doubts are essential to human nature. Very often a lawyer ends up having first-hand knowledge of the deepest manifestations of human suffering, such as bereavement coming from losing a loved one or the loss of one’s life savings. Many cases of mine spring to mind: from cases of serious injuries at work to those where whole communities went on to suffer immense losses due to industrial activities that, at the time, were not known to be dangerous; equally, I can think of some cases where the default of important financial institutions resulted in whole families losing all their wealth. Under such circumstances, I think the lawyer must trust the law and the trial. It is not up to us to decide; our role, quite agnostically, so to speak, is to call the court’s attention to all the flaws and fallacies of the prosecution’s case. If the law and the trial offer room for a defense, a lawyer is under the duty to exploit it, lest we accept the risk of an innocent being convicted. You have had a long and successful career in law. What do you attribute your longevity and success to? This is a tough one. Our field is fiercely competitive. Our goal has always been to make sure that our clients, whether persons or companies, enjoy the highest qualitative standard from a technical standpoint. This maxim is also the guideline that showed us the way when building the law firm of which I am co-founder with Avv. Francesca Ghetti, and name partner, and which features many professionals and young collaborators whose competence, professionalism and passion are absolutely noticeable. Therefore, credit should be given also to Avv. Francesca Ghetti and all the other colleagues who are part of the team. Having been a criminal lawyer for so many years, I am fully aware of what devastating consequences a criminal trial can have on people, especially physical persons. Just having to stand trial can, in itself and regardless of the final outcome, end a career which had been, that far, an extraordinary one. In this respect, beyond the technical side of the profession, we have always tried to penetrate the human aspect that lies behind any trial. To strike the right balance between the technical and procedural sides of the case on the one hand, and the professional and personal needs of the client on the other – keeping in mind that the latter are not always consistent with the length of the trial, it is far from being an easy task. It remains, nonetheless, a primary goal in our profession. For this reason, for instance, we expect of our young associates to undertake pro bono cases, so that they can have first-hand experience of those human aspects of our job that one tends to lose sight of when dealing with more complex cases. What advice would you give to young lawyers who aspire to specialize in law? Are there any complementary skills needed to work in criminal law in particular? Legal skills, together with linguistic proficiency, are necessary but not sufficient assets to make a good criminal lawyer, especially one versed in white-collar crime. Computer skills, especially those that enable effective “dialogue” with AI, are bound to have an increasingly important role. Social skills are also paramount. What is left? Passion, perseverance, self-sacrifice and curiosity about the many and most diverse subjects one will have the necessity and opportunity to know in-depth. In this respect, cognitive make-up is crucial, which enables a grasp of the underlying principles of all such different areas of knowledge so that one can put them to fruition in the best possible way in the context of the intended defensive strategy. Q Q Q Legal skills, together with linguistic proficiency, are necessary but not sufficient assets to make a good criminal lawyer, especially one versed in white-collar crime. “
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