Is Milan becoming a strategic hub for international law firms?

It is becoming one for deal-driven work — private equity, M&A, banking and finance, restructuring and the regulatory work that sits around them. A run of international firms has opened or materially expanded in Milan since 2024, drawn by Italy’s private-equity surge and by the city’s role as the country’s financial capital. But “hub’ should be read precisely: Milan is a fast-growing, still mid-sized and largely Italy-focused market, not yet a pan-regional centre on the scale of London or Paris. The bull case rests on capital and dealflow; the constraint is the depth of portable local talent.

Most international firms that commit to Italy run both cities, but with a division of labour. Milan is Italy’s financial and industrial capital — home to the Borsa Italiana / Euronext Milan exchange and the concentration of banks, funds and corporates that generate transactional work — while Rome anchors regulatory, antitrust and public-law work near the national institutions. When a firm builds a corporate, private-equity or finance practice in Italy, that practice almost always sits in Milan. Our practice-depth-by-city analysis explains why the biggest market is rarely the deepest for a given practice.

Private equity and the ecosystem around it — M&A, leveraged finance, private credit and the tax structuring that supports buyouts — account for most of the international-firm build-out we track. Restructuring and insolvency work is rising structurally following Italy’s 2022 crisis-and-insolvency code reform, capital-markets and public-to-private (take-private) work feeds transactional teams, and foreign-investment screening under the “Golden Power” regime is quietly creating demand for specialist regulatory lawyers. Employment and antitrust tend to be built as deal-adjacent support practices rather than standalone growth engines.

Yes — and this is the real constraint behind the headlines. The elite domestic bench that international firms recruit from is only about six firms deep, and the scarcest profiles combine an Italian qualification, genuine English fluency and a portable book of client relationships. Only Italian-bar-admitted lawyers may advise on Italian law, full qualification takes roughly six to seven years, and post-Brexit UK lawyers must register on a special foreign-legal-consultant roll to advise even on English law. The winning pattern is to hire lawyers with a real Italy connection — poached from a domestic firm, or Italian nationals returning from London or New York — rather than to parachute in outsiders.

There are real reasons for caution. The private-equity fundraising that ultimately feeds the work fell sharply in 2025 even as deal counts rose, the listed-equity market has seen delistings outpace new IPOs, civil litigation remains slow by European standards, and Italy’s tax system ranks poorly for competitiveness. None of that negates the growth — it means the honest read is “a durable, deal-driven expansion riding a strong but cyclical capital base,” not an unqualified one-way story. A firm weighing a Milan move should stress-test the demand it is actually underwriting, not the press-release momentum.

No — a great deal of Italian work is still run from London, Paris or Frankfurt through Italian-qualified partners and “Italian desks.” An office is a commitment to originating work locally rather than executing referred work, and it only pays off when the firm can staff it with genuinely portable, sponsor-trusted local talent. That is precisely why the market’s story is a talent story before it is a real-estate one. If you are weighing where your practice or your next hire fits, our lateral partner and practice-group recruiting team maps it candidly.