etc). Another major step we are taking, thanks to the huge effort of a dedicated team of lawyers, is becoming the first Italian law firm certified for gender equality. We created a venture capital through which we invest in start-ups and established a small office inside H-Farm, the most important Italian incubator. In the Genova office, developers and engineers work together to create legal tech products. The first one is an AI-based, NLP-driven search engine platform for internal documents. We have also offered to our clients the registration of IP assets on a blockchain bitcoin protocol. As you can imagine, I could go on. That said, and apart fromour achievements, we believe that innovability is a matter of human relationships. For this reason, we endeavour to focus on our growth as humans, and not only as professionals. For a young associate, this could mean creating his or her individual career path; for a lawyer with more experience, it could mean incentivising cross-selling and collaborating with a different number of professionals. For a partner, it could be listening and involving the younger generations so that they can have a greater impact and purpose, as well as accountability for their actions. Regarding the latter, I would also stress that we try to invest as much as possible in feedback (in both senses) and bottomup proposals from each member of the firm, whether professionals or PSLs. In an environment which is, by nature, strictly hierarchical, it is a small revolution on its own. What are the main challenges you currently face in your role? Being a lawyer by background but doing a different job from those of most of my peers, I believe that the biggest struggle is in the way my role is perceived. For the firm, how can I sell myself as a value and not a cost (or even an asset)? For the clients, how can I use my skills to make them more satisfied in our services? For the professionals, how can I involve them in my projects without affecting their daily (aka billable) duties? The challenge becomes greater once we shift from tangible to intangible effects. The more an innovation is visionary, the less it is quantifiable in terms of KPIs and ROIs – and the less that is quantifiable in KPIs and ROIs, the harder it is to ask for investments, which not only take into account the monetary part, but also the effort and the commitment of the various professionals involved. That said, I love challenges and I am a gritty-by-nature professional, so my glass is always half-full. You have developed significant experience regarding legal design. Can you tell us more about this? Legal design is a wonderful, unique discipline, which can be defined as the design of legal documents in a usercentric way. This means trying to bring into the legal world the mentality that made successful companies like Uber, Amazon and Netflix by starting from the final user and going backwards. I am very proud in saying that at LCA we are pioneers at an international level, and that I wrote, together with Barbara de Muro, the first Italian book on the matter. In the last few years, we also collaborated with the B Corp Mondora (one of our clients) to create “Design Rights”, the first Italian provider of legal design products, consulting and workshops that counts on the expertise of lawyers, but also graphic designers, design thinkers, psychologists and economists. In the last few years we worked with institutions and multinationals in the fields of telecommunications, food, pharma, banking, insurance etc. Sometimes the trick is not being a good lawyer or a good innovator, but in being in the right place at the right time. JUL 2022 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM MY LEGAL LIFE - MARCO IMPERIALE 25
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