Portolano Cavallo

Mergers & Acquisition

Private Equity

Partner

Francesco’s thirty year experience includes advising on M&A, private equity, and joint ventures. Most of his work is for US strategic buyers acquiring Italian companies, mostly in the digital/media sector, including devising and negotiating complex corporate structures to tackle issues such as foreign control restrictions, government regulatory  approvals, cross-media ownership, etc.

In the 2012 Financial Times Law 50 report Francesco was ranked among the “top 10 legal innovators in Europe”. According to the report Francesco “leads ‘a team of lawyers who refuse to be limited to inside-the-box thinking’ [and] tackled each challenge with deep insight and a tireless fascination for innovative approaches, with the sort of dynamic legal skill set one rarely sees in Italian media counsel”.

He was a member of the Technical Staff of the Ministry of Communications in 2006/2007, focusing on corporate issues in the TMT sector. He is past Co-Chair of the International Private Equity and Venture Capital Committee of the ABA Business Law Section.

Italian; English

Francesco has  obtained an LLM from the University of Chicago Law School. In 1991, at age 21, he graduated summa cum laude from the LUISS Guido Carli University.