Interview with: Andreina Degli Esposti, Lawyer – Founding Partner

What do you see as the main points that differentiate VILDE Law Firm from your competitors?

Describing VILDE – Villata, Degli Esposti e Associati law firm as a legal ‘boutique’, would not give the idea of the true nature of our law Firm, that proudly preserves a traditional spirit, but has also a strong proclivity to every form of improvement and innovation.

VILDE is highly specialized in various areas of administrative law: real estate, construction, urban planning, public procurement, health and pharmaceutical law, environmental law, energy, oil and gas, telecommunications and sports law.

This is the reason why, unlike other firms, we can provide legal advice and assistance in all areas of public law and, above all, we can do it with a high degree of specialization in relation to each sector, dealing also – as it happens very often – with very complex cases, producing excellent results and identifying the best possible solutions for our clients. This thanks to the firm’s team composed of several professionals who speak different languages (English, French, German…).

Which practices do you see growing in the next 12 months? What are the drivers behind that?

The areas that we believe will grow the most in the next 12 months and will also be affected by the European funding National Recovery and Resilience Plan (‘Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza’ – PNRR) are those relating to healthcare, telecommunications (with the creation of ultra-broadband and 5G), energy (to increase production from ‘renewable energy sources’ – RES – and the development of the electricity transmission network) and, last but not least, to the building and construction sector (aimed at increasing the recovery, regeneration and renovation of buildings and urban areas).

What’s the main change you’ve made in the firm that will benefit clients?

The pandemic crisis has also led in the legal sector – as in the others – to significant changes, which have consequently led to legal services being exclusively online. Therefore, we can say that from a technical point of view VILDE has updated all its systems, without suffering limitations regarding the services provided, under every profile: consultancy, judicial activity, webinar. With regard to the last one, the Firm has further implemented its research and publication activity on professional social networks and specialized magazines.

Furthermore, we remind you that in recent years, VILDE has opened new offices (e.g. such as that of Padua), has changed the Bologna office (with the transfer to a more central, prestigious and significant location), also implementing the different offices in Milan, Bologna and Padua with the recruitment of new staff. This therefore allows us to be closer to our clients, with a greater presence and knowledge of the territory where they operate.

Finally, we are happy to be able to confirm that the improvement to a more transparent and faster billing system, which had already been implemented last year, has produced excellent results.

Is technology changing the way you interact with your clients, and the services you can provide them?

In 2020, it was necessary for everyone to adapt to a new way of organizing the work that would be normally carried out in the Firm, but above all to a different and new management of the relationship with the clients

On the one hand, technology has made the relationship with the clients more complicated, but on the other it has certainly made it faster and more immediate.

In this last regard, we are very happy to illustrate that following an analysis conducted on our clients, we have verified a very high degree of satisfaction regarding the management of their activities. In fact, the team of twenty people of the firm has always been at the customer’s disposal in every way and without particular time limits: through video calls and sharing of documents, preparation of webinars concerning in-depth analysis relating to the customer’s subject of interest and greater care of professional social networks to allow constant updating.

Can you give us a practical example of how you have helped a client to add value to their business?

Vilde constantly offers reliable help in developing the business of its clients both in cases where we deal with judicial activities, and the extrajudicial one.

We therefore believe it is appropriate to provide three specific examples regarding three different types of activities offered to our clients (judicial, out-of-court consultancy, due diligence activities).

VILDE has recently achieved an important success in court before the Council of State which issued a judgment favorable to our client. The judge’s decision therefore allowed one of our long-standing clients to participate in a tender procedure announced by the Veneto Region, for the award through public procurement of the management of systems for regional health companies, for a total value of 1.5 billion Euros. We deem relevant also to underline the criminal/administrative judicial activity in defense of our customers.

VILDE Law Frim has recently given a “pro veritate” opinion on environmental law for a leading European company in filtering systems, that is the owner of a polluted plot of land. Through the aforementioned opinion, very concrete and operational indications were provided in order to allow the company to sell the land (albeit polluted) to another company, therefore allowing to enhance the client’s real estate assets.

Our Law Firm is also responsible for due diligence activities for an important real estate fund that intends to acquire more than 50 properties in Italy. The due diligence activity including the strengths and weaknesses, conformity and discrepancies of each property are detected, from a building-urban planning, environmental, safety point of view, etc. It is an activity that has allowed the Client to create a valid and solid offer to submit to the seller for the purpose of acquiring all the properties.

Are clients looking for stability and strategic direction from their law firms – where do you see the firm in three years’ time?

The above examples show that VILDE is the reference point for its clients. In fact, the verification of the correctness of the procedures, the acts and the measures underlying the market operations that the Client wants to undertake are continuously requested. Similarly, the request for verification of the correctness of the company’s internal procedures is frequent, and this means that the company can guarantee a certain stability on the market and prove to be reliable to its stakeholders or shareholders.

I hope to see my Firm rooted and consoliding its leadership position in the ‘hystoric’ sectors we deal with, like health care, environmental, urban planning, telecommunication, oil and gas, building and construction and confirming its presence in the new sectors in which we’ve been working in the more recent years, like sports law, biomedical law and last but not the least, in the new concept of building and construction related to the real estate operations.