We are honored to have the opportunity to sit down with Guido Alleva, a distinguished lawyer and the founder of Alleva Law Firm, to discuss his remarkable journey into law. With a career spanning over 35 years, Guido has established himself as a leading figure in the realm of white-collar crime and other complex areas of law. In this interview, Guido shares insights into what inspired him to pursue a legal career, his specialization in white-collar crime, and the challenges he has faced along the way. He also provides a glimpse into the significant cases that have defined his career and the values that continue to drive his work at Alleva Law Firm.
Guido, can you tell us about your journey into law and what led you to specialize in white-collar crime, amongst other areas of law?
It is a long story. To an extent, it is a family thing: my father was a lawyer too, but he specialized in a different branch of the law. My keenness on human and social sciences, I believe, lies at the roots of my career; it was the same passion that brought me to France, where I studied for some time before landing, so to speak, at the Faculty of Law of the Catholic University, in Milan. After all, criminal law is where human rights and the enforcement of the law intersect, whether we are talking about the rights of the victim or the rights of the defendant. Indeed, I would say that if one wants to measure the degree of civilization of a country, one should look into the daily functioning of courtrooms and, there, look at the substantive and procedural guarantees offered by the law as a crucial indicator. In the course of my career, many factors drove me towards specializing in white-collar crime. Without doubt, having taken my first steps with an undisputed authority in the field, Professor Alberto Crespi, played a role in that. My innate curiosity must have had a bearing too: indeed, defending a person in a criminal trial is a multidisciplinary enterprise and success is ensured only by enriching one's legal background with knowledge of the most disparate subjects, from engineering to medicine, from finance to other branches of the domestic and international law.
Studio Legale Alleva & Associati has handled many high-profile cases. Can you share a particularly challenging case and how your team managed to achieve a successful outcome?
I can hardly pick one. During my over 35-year-long career, I had the honor to be on many of the main business-related criminal cases that occurred in Italy, such as the Sindona's affair, the crack of the Banco Ambrosiano, the inquiries of "Mani Pulite", the disaster of Porto Marghera, the Cirio and Parmalat cases, the BNL-UNIPOL trial, the Italease case, the trial of IFIL-EXOR, the MPS case, the trials of ENI Algeria and ENI Nigeria, the Thyssenkrupp case, the ETERNIT case and many others. Complexity has always been common to all our engagements: we collect multiple items of information by looking into the Prosecutor's file and by talking to our clients and expert witnesses; equally, in every case there are always multiple issues that fall for consideration, in point of law and fact, and, when studying them, we must consistently attain the highest degree of depth. We leave nothing to chance. To achieve this, team working is key and, in this respect, I must say that serving as an officer in the Italian mountain troops had a significant impact on my personal development and education: a team can properly work only as long as every role is clearly set out and every team-member is fully aware that one's work affects everyone else's and, thereby, the final outcome. Setting a defensive line is, likewise, a collective enterprise that requires all team members' contributions to be put together in a meaningful way as a result of a constant exchange of views. Some years ago, we dealt with a case which would then become a leading case as to "preventive measures" applied to businesses. Being without any precedents in the previous applications of the same rules, the experience was of the highest interest. Eventually, we were able to come up with new solutions that enabled us effectively to deal with the organizational shortcomings pointed out by the Prosecutor and the Court - thereby achieving the withdrawal of the preventive measure enforced against the company we were representing - and, at the same time, allowed us to ensure our client's going concern throughout all the proceeding.
What are the most common types of white-collar crimes you encounter, and how have the types of offenses being committed evolved over the years?
In my career, I have found myself defending people against the most diverse kinds of allegations. In Italy, in the early 90s, it was almost all about bribery; then, scientific development and new epidemiological patterns resulted in mounting attention towards environmental offences, defective-product liability and health and safety at work. Moreover, the large bank conglomerates that formed in Italy at the beginning of the millennium, together with the trend of the financial markets and the 2007-2008 crisis, had ramifications in cases that hit the crime-news sections, involving prominent financial institutions and independent authorities. Recently, I have noticed the increasing use of preventive measures, whose application nowadays transcends their original criminological rationale, as it was conceived in the 90s, on top of the expansion of the borders and application of body corporate "criminal" liability. By and large, these are evolutive trends that reflect widespread social concerns and, at the same time, constitute tentative answers to the same social anxiety, given, at first, by the regulator, and then by Prosecution offices. After all, as I said earlier, the law is a historical and social phenomenon, and one cannot understand it outside of the relevant societal context that the law itself is supposed to regulate. Eventually, one should not overlook the impulse that the full enforcement of the EPPO system will most likely provide in those areas that fall under EU competence.
How do you stay updated with the constantly evolving landscape of white-collar crime law and ensure your team is equipped with the latest knowledge and tools?
Access to data is paramount. Our associates can tap into the most up-to-date databanks so that they can be consistently provided with a complete picture of all the relevant legislative, judicial, and scientific developments. More generally, organizing and attending conferences also constitutes a necessary and profitable opportunity for exchange with colleagues, prosecutors, judges and other professional figures in the field of law and economics. One must not be oblivious to the importance of network-building in our profession; equally, we should never underestimate access to news: we must be aware of the world wherein we carry out our activity.
Can you discuss the role of technology and forensic accounting in building a strong case for white-collar crime? How has AI impacted your work in recent years?
The role of such technologies, nowadays, has become crucial. Throughout their investigations, prosecutors gather an amount of data and information that was hardly conceivable only few years ago. After all, digitalization and dematerialization of companies' business records has significantly increased what is being stored; accordingly, there is hardly one business activity in a company which cannot be traced back, often to several years, by aid of a precise and substantial record of emails or by sieving documents stored on dedicated servers, often held abroad. Clearly, analyzing such a huge amount of data would not be feasible without aid coming from new technologies. AI will become more and more significant in selecting useful information. These are the most apparent developments, but there are many more whose actual impact can hardly be determined at the moment. One could think, for instance, of scientific trials conducted in the field of "predictive justice", which may prove very troublesome in the context of the criminal law. Quite intelligently, it has been argued that this cutting-edge employment of AI technology in the criminal trial may come with a risk of drifting away from a fact-based approach to a personality-based one, the latter approach being often referred to by Italian scholars as predicated upon a "colpa d'autore", i.e.: author's fault. In this respect, we should be mindful to the experiences of other jurisdictions. I am talking about cases like "Loomis", decided by the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin. The trial's court had determined the risk of recidivism, relevant for sentencing, based on an AI system which had highlighted as biases some racial discriminations. The Supreme Court asserted that "the fact finder must apply the results returned by the program with discretion and balance them against other relevant factors". Another very delicate point concerns the "equality-of-arms" principle: according to said principle, using AI in a criminal trial should imply that the defendant must be granted the same right to access to technological means as available to the Prosecutor. Right now, this is not the case. Thinking of a well-known case that I am currently dealing with concerning the collapse of an important national infrastructure, the Prosecutor has employed a costly AI system, paid with taxpayers' money, which enables the examination of a gigantic amount of digital data. A defendant - who will never be able to rely on such resources as those in a national budget, cannot purchase the same tool; this disparity consists of a glaring breach of the equality-of-arms principle. The issue was submitted to the Court, which actually failed to address the main point. Still, it will take some time more - though not that much - before we have an extremely widespread implementation of adequately "trained" AI, but the technology is here to stay; accordingly, lawyers will need to learn how to make the most of these tools, without, at the same time, allowing these technologies to overwhelm them. Not an easy task.
What is the process you follow when involved with a case? Is there such a thing as a typical case?
Every case is unique. Our legal counselling is "tailored" to the needs of our client, whether he is a manager or a company, having regard to that specific trial. In order to lay out an effective strategy, one must first get acquainted with every corner of the "battlefield". Therefore, studying and elaborating fastidiously all the information collected by the Prosecutor and provided by the client as well, represents a first and unavoidable step. During this early stage of our legal assistance, defensive investigations are of the highest importance: as a rule, the Prosecutor is inclined to assume that the investigations they conducted are thorough and complete; therefore, if a lawyer wants to spare their client a charge, they must be able to put a dent into the structure of the prosecutions' factual hypothesis by introducing utterly new circumstances that might have got past their attention. In this respect, defensive investigations prove the most useful device in the lawyer's toolbox. Moreover, the evidence so collected is protected by attorney-client privilege, making defensive investigations the safest means to carry out internal inquiries for companies when there is reasonable suspicion of frauds or other crimes being committed by employees. Moving to the next phases of the trial, cross-examination is a delicate and crucial passage for the final outcome; it must be prepared with painstaking attention, the team must look into every single fact the witness can be possibly questioned on, being ready to handle every possible statement, much as unforeseeable as it may be, so that the evidential goal at the heart of the defensive strategy can be attained. The conclusive stage, the closing speech, must be the distillate of all the evidence brought to the court's attention, derived by accurate selection of those items which are more likely to persuade the factfinder. Beside all the litigation-related activities, there is also the non-judicial advisory function, meant to aid companies in assessing and managing the "criminal-law risk" that comes with entrance into the Italian market and, more generally, entailed by their own organization and by the specific type of business they conduct. This step also requires full awareness of the relevant operational background, as well as comprehension of the specific needs of the client. Once the factual and legal backdrop has been established, our team will work side by side with companies in outlining those arrangements that can prove the most effective in preserving their going concern and, at the same time, either eliminating all relevant risks altogether or, if not possible, attaining a sufficient level of reduction.
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.
