What Thoughtful Growth Looks Like at a Specialist Practice in Italy

How My Lawyer in Italy (MLI) built the infrastructure to handle a growing team and an expanding practice

My Lawyer in Italy (MLI) has operated from central Italy since 2014, built around a niche that few firms outside the country have mastered. Founded by Arturo Grasso, the firm works almost exclusively with English-speaking clients who need legal help navigating Italian matters from citizenship to property and inheritance. It’s specialist work that requires careful handling of documents across two languages, two legal systems, and often multiple generations of family history.

When Martina Longueira joined as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at the start of 2022, the firm had five people and a growing reputation built almost entirely on word of mouth. Interest in Italian citizenship by descent had surged in recent years. People of Italian origin living in the US, the UK, and elsewhere were finding they could apply for citizenship based on their ancestry. MLI understood that work, and clients who had been through the process were telling others. 

The team was managing their growing caseload through shared files and documents, with no central system.

For a five-person team handling a contained workload, the approach worked. But the firm was about to start growing.

Outgrowing the old way of working

Over the following two years, MLI grew from five employees to 15, across two locations in Italy. The volume of clients expanded at the same pace, and with it, they saw an exponential increase in the number of documents the team was receiving, processing, and creating. With their existing system, they began to notice an impact on how quickly they could respond to clients and do their work.

“Not only did our number of employees grow, but the number of our clients was growing as well,” Martina says. “Both of those grew so quickly that we needed to find a better solution.”

Martina recognised a need for change and took action.

MLI had already tried another software alternative before finding Clio. The platform was built for sectors rather than law firms, so the customisation required to make it work for their legal practice proved too expensive and time-consuming. They paused and looked again.

Their search eventually led them to Clio through online research. At the time, they weren’t aware of any other law firm in Italy using it, but two things stood out immediately.

Bringing the whole team along

For a team that included people at different levels of comfort with cloud technology, ease of adoption mattered as much as the features. Some team members took longer than others to get comfortable with the platform, and that was expected. Clio’s onboarding team ran structured video calls, which helped set the rollout up well from the start and gave everyone room to move at their own pace.

Today, every single person at MLI uses Clio, whether they work directly with clients or not. Client-facing staff use it every day. Even the accounting team, whose bookkeeping runs through Italy-specific regulatory software, often checks in to see what stage a client’s matter has reached. 

Clio has become, as Martina puts it, integral to the firm.

That matters more at MLI than it might at most practices. Running a firm that serves English-speaking clients through an Italian legal system means operating across two languages, two sets of processes, and two very different expectations of how quickly things move. 

“Our clients are familiar with the relative speed and simpler processes of the US or the UK,” Martina says.

The work, connected in one place

MLI has been on Clio for just over two years, and the team has made the most of every month of it. For example, creating a client matter now takes about 25% less time than it did before. 

“Teams have saved approximately ten hours a week,” Martina says.

For a firm handling a high volume of complex cases, those hours add up quickly. The time savings and peace of mind have a huge impact on the team’s bandwidth. 

The impact isn’t only felt at the team level. For the managing partner, the more tangible shift is being able to walk into any client call knowing exactly where each matter stands. In a practice built on long-term relationships and complex cases, that visibility matters. 

“That alone has been priceless,” Martina says. 

Two years in, MLI is still finding new ways to use the platform. Martina has been using reporting tools to pull analysis and insights at the firm level, as well as looking into customisation for matter management. The team is also beginning to explore more sophisticated uses of automation for creating routine documents. As the firm continues to grow, there’s more to explore with every step.

Room to keep growing

MLI is now expanding into tax and company-related services for expats and foreign investors, alongside its core citizenship, property and inheritance work. Italian law is changing with eligibility for citizenship by descent tightening, and the firm is proactively adapting. As MLI has expanded into new practice areas, having a platform that could be configured differently for each one meant they could grow without rebuilding their processes from scratch each time.

For MLI, growth isn’t a finish line. It’s a steady process of building on what works, and making room for what’s next.