The firm deals with virtually any civil and administrative law sector, with experience both in litigation and on extra-judicial consultancy. Thanks to the of counsel members, legal services in criminal, tax, banking, financial and labour law are offered.
The following areas became more and more important, thanks to the experience and the clients who trust the firm:
Many have inquired about our involvement in Free Software, AKA open source software, because a glimpse of coverage we received from the international press. While we know that journalists are curious by nature, we reluctantly speak about it when interviewed, and prefer to go to the subject matter. Nonetheless, to provide some general background, a few lines are mandatory.
We started implementing "open source" IT apparatus since the foundation of the firm, and thus became involved in the market as simple customers, without any major commitment and out of curiosity. At that time we had several years' experience in Information Technology Law, as well as a technical background in the software market. The need arouse for competent hands-on assistance, and we found it natural to seek it from the local LUG (Linux User Group),namely, the MiLUG.
We got in touch with some representatives of the Italian branch of the Free Software Fondation Europe, and started to advise them submarinely on a number of issues. The hell broke loose when rumors about soon-to-be antitrust sanctions against one major software house lead us an innocent inquiry as to what was the position of the FSFE was. The hectic follow-up to this innocent question is today difficult to report. The bottom line is that we received a proxy to act on behalf of the FSFE and the Samba Team and were fully immersed in what was meant an idle, formal representation of a charitable association in a serious business dispute, and turned out to be a full-fledged primetime antitrust litigation, which now runs into the tens of thousand pages of brief, documents, expertises. The main installment of it has ended on the 17 September 2007 with a judgment clearly finding as demanded by the party we represent. Meanwhile we have taken over also the position of another important player of the Free Software area, Openoffice.org.
To make a long story short, we are not a full-time Free Software Law advising firm, and our software-related clients are also within the "proprietary" sector. For a series of coincidences, however, we discovered that a lot of our already existing IT clients were also very interested in "open source" and soon got back to us for the various legal implication of this very strange specialty, and more approached, also because Carlo Piana was selected as legal editor of Linux Magazine, and more recently of Linea EDP, one of the leading IT-for-business weekly magazines in Italy, besides publishing on a regular basis on Interlex, a quite famous IT law review.
We are so deep into this that Carlo Piana has been appointed to advise the Software Freedom Law Center and the Free Software Foundation on the adoption of the new GNU GPL v. 3, and now are part of the European Legal Network of the Freedom Task Force of the FSFE.
But our involvment in IT, and our general practice, do not stop at Free Software, which is only a part of our work.
We act in a full range of activities, which exceed the specialty for which we are most famous, also for "traditional" (including "proprietary" software makers) clients and non-software related IT companies and other general clients. Only considering the IT&TLC, for which we contributed founding and developing euroITcounsel®, a network between European lawyers specialised in said area of law of which we are the Italian representatives, we have experience in IT and software contracts, licensing, data protection, technology transfers, online services, distance selling, etc.
Besides, we have an extensive practice in public procurement matters, also in litigation before the Administrative courts. More recently we developed skills in gas & energy, having heavily contributed in projects for the building of gas power plant. And of course a strong general commercial practice is well within the specialties of the house.
Our readers would appreciate that our bar rules prevent us from disclosing much detailed information on our activities, success and clients (despite some of our colleagues plainly disregard this limitation), therefore we cannot be more specific. Upon request and only for reference checking we could provide a confidential list of representative clients and a brief summary of the kind of activities we have experienced so far, for inspection.