Bocconi launches legal counsel school that trains corporate lawyers

There are corporate crises, as well as mergers and acquisitions, but there is also the technological innovation that is affecting all activities, bringing increasingly complex dynamics on the organisational and relational level. Corporate lawyers, as well as lawyers of the Bar who for various reasons come into contact with companies, are called upon to enter into many more games than in the past: their training must therefore open up to new topics such as those that the 2025 edition of the course for Legal counsel organised by Bocconi University under the direction of Professor Luigi A Bianchi and lawyer Piergiuseppe Biandrino, who is scientific coordinator of the course and executive vice-president of Edison, has sought to intercept. Enrolment is open until 18 November, and lessons will begin in January of the new year and end in May.

The post-graduate course, which was designed for corporate lawyers but later opened up to an ever-wider audience of lawyers, as Biandrino explains, 'is now more than 20 years old and has evolved greatly over time. Our forefathers in the academy, starting with Ariberto Mignoli, the course's creator and one of the great masters of commercial law of the last century, had organised a specialisation course for corporate lawyers way back in the day. A dozen years ago, Professor Bianchi and I had the idea of reviving that specialisation course to train the figure of the in-house counsellor, that is, the jurist who works within companies, with profound changes because compared to what our founding fathers had left us, things have changed a lot. Then three years ago we realised that the world had changed even more and so we further updated and changed the programme of this, which is not simply a refresher course, as its duration also states, but a real training school on the topics of greatest interest and topicality for those who practice the law of structured companies'.

Compared to the previous editions, the module dedicated to "The practice of legal counsel" has been further enriched and the composition of the faculty has been consequently integrated, which includes not only authoritative university professors but also legal counsels working within companies, notaries, lawyers of the free bar, magistrates and general counsels, also of international extraction. Among them there is a significant presence of some of the most important Italian general counsels, including those of Eni, Snam, Edison, Acea, Fincantieri, Nexans and Investindustrial.

Corporate lawyers are increasingly required to possess not only a solid theoretical background, but also the aptitude and ability to deal with and resolve, with pragmatic and effective solutions, an increasing variety of problems that are not only strictly legal but also organisational and relational in nature. One thinks of the management of corporate crises or major litigation, or of assistance to corporate bodies and corporate control functions, but also of assistance in the case of mergers and acquisitions, cites Biandrino as an example, who explains the need to "introduce a module dedicated to financial statement issues that teaches how to read the balance sheet reflection on legal issues". There will also be a part dedicated to the spread of new technologies in business operations, to which a specific session will be devoted during the course, requiring corporate lawyers to possess significant flexibility and adaptability to take account of the significant changes taking place in the profession.