I am a dual qualified English Solicitor and Italian Avvocato with over 20 years of international experience, developed mostly in the energy and renewables sector, and an ICF (International Coaching Federation ) and IECL (Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership) certified Organisational Coach.
In my latest corporate role, I was Vice President and General Counsel Upstream Europe and Oceania for Eni as well as Director of over 30 companies of the Eni Group operating across many jurisdictions and cultures. I recruited, led and developed high-performing teams of in-house lawyers operating in multiple jurisdictions delivering commercial, corporate, compliance, M&A and litigation services.
My key professional experiences include board-level legal leadership, governance and risk management in oil and gas projects and international JVs.
I selected and worked with magic circle, regional and international law firms.
A substantial part of my work was devoted to understanding the divide, as well as the areas of convergence, between common law systems and civil law systems and how the legal profession operates in each. In my early years, I completed a stage at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg; it was a unique opportunity to see fundamentally different approaches working together. I trained in private practice at Herbert Smith Freehills, both in Brussels and in London.
I hold a Law degree from the University of Bologna in Italy. I researched my graduation dissertation as a Socrates Erasmus scholar at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, which ignited my desire to understand how different legislators address similar issues. I completed a period of post-graduate study as a scholar at the University of Cambridge in the UK. I then pursued my post-graduate education at Duke University in the United States for a Master of Laws (LLM). I completed my executive education in Management at the University of Oxford, Saïd Business School (UK).
I offer my experience as a lawyer using a coaching approach to meet the unique challenges of each organisation as well as those of individual legal professionals. I align my approach with the gold standard in coaching as an Associate Certified Coach accredited by the International Coaching Federation.
I am the mother of three young children. To me, family and friends remain one of the greatest fields of life where we learn whole-body listening, justice, radical acceptance and time management. Fundamentally, where we stress-test all qualities of leadership.
I trained as a dancer from the age of three until my early twenties, which aligned with the completion of my university education. I thoroughly enjoyed performing, choreographing and stretching any artistic expression of movement as a language that reaches where words cannot. One of the greatest lessons I learned during my not-always-easy years as a dancer is that in order to make progress in life, we must do the thing we fear the most. Inevitably, this involves profound change.
I do not try to dance better than anyone else.
I only try to dance better than myself.
Legal professionals play a central role for the organisations they serve. Yet little of their training and education prepares them for understanding the inner workings of organisations’ cultures, promoting diversity and cross-silo collaboration or developing their own leadership skills to support the leaders they advise.
Through many years of mentoring and internal coaching, I realised that there is a deeply felt need for lawyers of all seniorities to receive the guidance, insight and support necessary to develop the thinking skills they require to succeed. Promoting a stronger coaching culture in the legal profession means promoting a positive mindset around challenging more and asking more thought-provoking questions to themselves, to the decision makers, business leaders and legal teams they work with.
My work wishes to encourage the development of a stronger coaching culture that is bespoke to – and has an inside-out understanding of – the unique challenges the legal profession faces.
I do this by combining the gold standards in coaching with my own experience of having “done the job” and in particular through the following activities and initiatives:
Resources are available on my website, along with authoring articles for the Law Society InsideOut Magazine, which help legal professionals navigate their daily challenges, such as managing difficult personalities in the workplace, running better meetings, and regaining well-being when work is burning them out.
I am an executive contributor for Brainz Magazine and feel honoured to be featured on their 2023 CREA Global Awards List.
