Francesco Portolano

Practice Areas

Mergers & Acquisitions; Private Equity; Tech Transactions

Career

Francesco’s thirty year experience includes advising on M&A, private equity, and joint ventures. The majority of his work is for foreign (mostly US) strategic buyers acquiring Italian companies, mostly in the digital, media and technology sectors, including devising and negotiating complex corporate structures to tackle issues such as foreign control restrictions, regulatory approvals and constraints, cross-media ownership, etc.

In the 2012 Financial Times Law 50 report Francesco was ranked among the “top 10 legal innovators in Europe”. According to the report Francesco “leads ‘a team of lawyers who refuse to be limited to inside-the-box thinking’ [and] tackled each challenge with deep insight and a tireless fascination for innovative approaches, with the sort of dynamic legal skill set one rarely sees in Italian media counsel”.

He is adjunct faculty of “M&A in the Digital Media” with the LLM in Law of Internet Technology at Bocconi Law School in Milan. He was a member of the Technical Staff of the Ministry of Communications in 2006/2007, focusing on corporate issues in the TMT sector. He is past Co-Chair of the International Private Equity and Venture Capital Committee of the ABA Business Law Section.