About

Once listed amongst the 30 most influential Italian female lawyers in Vanity Fair, Marilù Capparelli is one of the managing directors of the Google legal department in the EMEA area, and leads a team of lawyers located in various different countries. After eight years of private practice in international law firms and five years in-house as head of the Italian legal and public policy department for eBay, she joined Google in 2009 as head of the Italian legal function and two years later was promoted to senior regional counsel – head of legal for Italy, Greece and Turkey. She was then promoted to her current role in May 2015. Not only has Capparelli amassed vast experience in major international law firms and at the Courts of Justice of the European Union but also working in-house. ‘Working in-house has given me an amazing opportunity to learn about business and how law works in practice. I had the opportunity to get greater and broader responsibility at a much earlier stage in my career and more change to put my skills into practice’ says Capparelli. During her time at Google she has had to make sure that the legal team educates the organisation enough to understand when they should be seeking legal advice and that they do so at the right stage, whilst supporting the business and its vision. She cites that one of the best parts of her job is finding and training talented people and watching them develop and progress. It is to this end that Capparelli has been behind creating ad hoc training programs for university students that want to become in-house lawyers in order to train talents before hiring them – an initiative that has been replicated in other countries. Of this she explains: ‘I also encouraged my team to progress in different ways, not only vertically but across the legal department through rotation programs. This effort was recognised in the wider legal department and we worked very thoughtfully on rotation programs for our best talents’. Most notably she has been involved in obtaining the lift of an access ban to YouTube in Turkey, by obtaining a constitutional court’s decision in favour of Google that attested that the access ban to YouTube was disproportionate, in violation of freedom of speech and against the Turkish Constitution as well as the European Convention on Human Rights. She has also worked on a number of significant projects in the media industry, one being her involvement in the negotiation and conclusion of a partnership deal with FIEG (Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers), the largest news organisation in Italy, towards promoting an innovative approach to publishing in the digital era. Her role in this has led her to recently being selected amongst Italian leaders in her sector by Harvard Law School to give a speech to the faculty on legal and policy challenges in the digital age. Further supplementing her outstanding in-house career, Capparelli is a member of the board of directors of the Italian news publishing group RCS MediaGroup, where she also covers the role of lead independent board director and of one of the leading players in the world of luxury goods, Tod’s.