About

A highly praised corporate affairs, legal and compliance manager at Italian fashion house Trussardi, Sara Citterio is described by her peers as a ‘deeply experienced in-house lawyer, with a strong knowledge of critical topics in the fashion and intellectual property industries’. As an integral part of the executive decision-making, under her management the legal department of the company incorporated the compliance department in 2010, and later on the corporate secretary function of the group, and now currently supervises all legal affairs matters including compliance. Citterio currently oversees a legal team of three people and one person from the corporate secretary office. Due to the relatively small size of the department, she reorganised the team’s work to more efficiently meet the needs of internal clients to ensure prompt and consistent responses to the daily legal needs of the organisation. ‘We started implementing a template database of multilingual agreements to be used as a starting point for negotiations’ adds Citterio, starting from franchise agreements she revised the templates of the agreements in use to make sure that the standard clauses were negotiated in all major contracts. When she started working for Trussardi, the legal department was mainly involved in the legal affairs of the IP company Trussardi and its affiliated companies, with the exclusion of its operational company Rotondi Evolution, which was then listed on the Milan Stock Exchange, to which they provided general legal guidelines but did not support on a daily basis. ‘The tables turned around in 2004,’ reveals Citterio, ‘when Rotondi Evolution was delisted and as holding company we started being increasingly involved as a legal department in the ordinary activities of this company too’. Although the last three years have been particularly busy for the department, in 2016 Citterio led her team to work alongside the lawyers of each shareholder of the holding company in the corporate restructuring of the group. Described by a nominator as a ‘real expert in contract negotiations’, in 2017 she skilfully negotiated a joint venture agreement with the Japanese group Yagi, for the creation of a local joint venture company to manage wholesale and retail operations in Japan. Citterio is also a public speaker and panellist at many meetings and events where she speaks on regulatory requirements as seen from her long-term general counsel experience.