About

Federico Dal Poz assumed his current position as group legal and corporate affairs officer at Amplifon, the world leader in hearing aid retail, in November 2016. Dal Poz has been implementing changes to the corporate and local legal teams during this time, working on the Italy and the US legal functions of the company to make them work seamlessly together both on mutual projects and in general. On these structural changes, Dal Poz explains that the team is ‘trying to export the best practices developed into each legal department to the others [like] franchising experience from the US being made available to Italy, for the benefit of the local agency network. This directly affects the business and new solutions potentially available for them to exploit and made me the go-to-person for all legal matters of corporate relevance, irrespective of where they arise’. Additionally, in terms of transactions, Dal Poz and his team are working extensively on an industry-first “retail brand” project, whereby Amplifon are having new products manufactured exclusively combined with a brand new digital ecosystem (including an app, online shop and more). This project requires the team to work on a wide variety of legal matters and topics, including large contracts, antitrust, regulation, IP and data privacy. Before being appointed to his current role, Dal Poz was head of legal EMEA at Luxottica, a world leader in eyewear, and general counsel at Sorgenia, a large Italian energy conglomerate with a wide European footprint. Before going in-house he had a long career in private practice most recently with Allen & Overy in its Milan and London offices. During his career Dal Poz has developed significant experience in all commercial legal matters, as well as leadership and managerial skills. While he was at Sorgenia, owing mainly to the financial crisis, the group went abruptly (in just a few months) from being a very healthy company to being almost bankrupt, with banks and creditors claiming money and freezing credit lines. The company had to go through a very complicated and painful legal procedure, the Italian equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in respect of the company’s huge debt of approximately €2bn, of which more than €500m was excess debt. This challenging experience, as well as an entire career of working with and leading legal teams has developed a range of skills which has seen Dal Poz become one of the most outstanding in-house counsel in Italy.