Latham & Watkins LLP

The firm: Latham & Watkins is a leading international law firm serving multinational companies, start-ups, investment banks, private equity funds, venture capital firms, sovereign wealth funds, governments and other organisations. The firm’s global platform spans Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the US, and consists of internationally recognised practices across a wide spectrum of transactional, litigation, corporate and regulatory areas. Latham attorneys offer unrivalled legal resources and strategic commercial thinking to provide clients with innovative solutions to complex business and legal matters.

Italian practice: Latham & Watkins in Italy offers an on-the-ground understanding of local markets, Italian and US law capabilities and a significant footprint that few international firms can match.

In addition, Latham has extensive experience advising on the international aspects of a broad range of transactions for Italian clients. The latter benefit from high-level legal expertise as they develop their business though both inbound and outbound investment activities.

Areas of practice: Latham’s Italian practice, operating from offices in Milan and Rome, regularly represents large and mid-sized Italian and international companies and financial institutions doing business throughout Italy. Its lawyers handle capital markets, M&A, private equity, leveraged finance, insolvency and restructuring, and real estate transactions, and also advise Italian and international clients on general corporate, antitrust, administrative law and litigation cases.

The group has extensive experience with inbound and outbound Italian M&A including private, public and private-equity backed acquisitions, advice on extending European-based tender offers to the US market and arranging public and private financing of such transactions. The Italian team also advises Italian and international lenders, developers, investors, borrowers, property owners and tenants on an extensive range of real estate transactions. On the corporate finance side, Latham’s experience spans capital market transactions, including SEC-registered deals, Rule 144A and Regulation S offerings, IPOs and debt offerings.

The Italian banking and finance team represents Italian lenders and borrowers on a range of matters, including leveraged finance, insolvency and restructuring, advising on integrated bank and bond products, including senior, subordinated and mezzanine debt transactions, and bridge financings.

Latham’s Italian litigation capacity includes full-service litigation solutions. With a core team of commercial litigation, arbitration and ADR, and a particular focus on company law matters, M&A and joint venture disputes, corporate insolvency and directors’ liability, the firm can handle the most complex national and international disputes. In addition, the Italian offices can boast an administrative law practice that represents private and public companies before administrative law courts in all aspects of complex energy, real estate and infrastructure projects, including development and permitting processes, litigation counsel on administrative law and legal compliance issues, legal diligence and opinions on public law matters, public regulations across highly-regulated sectors as well as environmental authorisations and public procurement matters.

The Italian offices incorporate an antitrust group that is an integral part of the firm’s global antitrust and competition practice. The firm has represented a number of large Italian and foreign companies before the European Commission, the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (the Italian Antitrust Authority), and the Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (the Italian National Regulatory Agency for Telecommunications), Italian courts and EC courts.