The Strategists: Women in Legal Marketing & Business Development

For decades, marketing and business development in Italian law firms occupied a clearly subordinate position: operational support, events coordination, materials production. The seven voices in this article have spent their careers dismantling that positioning, one decision at a time, until the function they lead is recognised not as a service to strategy but as a constituent part of it. Their accounts of how that shift happened, and what it required, represent an insightful and practical section of this report.

What unites them is not a single method but a shared insistence on the same transition: from communicating value to helping shape it. The moment marketing intervenes before decisions are made rather than after, from sector selection to practice structuring to geographic priority, is the moment it becomes genuinely strategic. Several contributors in this section have reached that moment. All of them are still working to make it permanent.

Claire Cardinaletti & Monica Scopelliti
Marketing, Communication and BD Team · CastaldiPartners
Communications, CRM & Client Growth

Claire Cardinaletti and Monica Scopelliti lead marketing, communications, and business development at CastaldiPartners, a firm celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in 2026. They operate as a team in the truest sense: their contribution to this report is submitted jointly, reflecting a genuinely shared vision. Their account of what has enabled the CastaldiPartners brand to endure and evolve over three decades is a testament to their collaborative work in building and strengthening that legacy today. The anniversary is not incidental context. It is the proof of concept for everything they argue about how a firm's values become credible externally only when they are real internally.

Cardinaletti and Scopelliti's central argument is about sequence. The real turning point at CastaldiPartners, they explain, was starting from within: building a sense of belonging and consistent internal communication capable of making the firm's values concrete and shared among professionals first. External recognition followed because it had something genuine to recognise. This inside-out approach is, in their account, the only one that produces a brand identity that holds over time.

On diversity, they let composition speak rather than declaration. Women represent 70% of CastaldiPartners' lawyers. Clients perceive this through the diversity of voices around the table, the accessibility of teams, and the level of responsibility held by women at all levels of seniority. The commitment is experienced directly by clients, not simply stated to them. That distinction, between a value that is performed and one that is lived, is what they have spent their careers making legible.

The shift they consider most important in firm culture is structural: transforming a firm from a traditional partner-led structure into a genuine community, with open and transparent governance, shared values, and organisational models that recognise the contribution of the marketing and BD team as a strategic function rather than an operational support.

✦  Integrated cultures, shared leadership: women shaping the future of the legal market.
— Claire Cardinaletti & Monica Scopelliti

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Gaia Francieri
Partner · Consulta
Business Development and Strategy

Gaia Francieri is a partner at Consulta and one of the most analytically precise voices in Italian legal business development. Her career has been built around a problem that she names without evasion: in most Italian firms, the challenge for marketing and BD professionals is not competence. It is authority. Earning a strategic seat in a partner-led environment requires more than expertise. It requires repositioning the function itself, persuading the organisation that marketing is a driver of growth and risk management, not a producer of materials and events. She has done this, and her account of how is a tutorial in the mechanics of influence.

Francieri's method was a deliberate reframe of what she reported and how she reported it. She stopped presenting activity and started presenting decisions: framed in terms of market positioning, competitive advantage, and long-term sustainability. Strategy, in her formulation, is not about visibility. It is about influence. And influence, in a law firm, is earned by demonstrating that your analysis changes outcomes, not just communications.

Her most provocative insight concerns mentorship running in reverse. Younger women in her experience often have a freer mindset, fewer internalised limits, a directness that challenges their seniors, and an expectation of fairness as normal rather than exceptional. In many cases, she says, they mentor us, particularly in confidence, digital fluency, and cultural courage. This observation is not offered as a complaint. It is offered as a reason for genuine optimism about where the profession is heading.

Her hard truth for young women in BD is deliberately provocative: do not aim to be liked. Aim to be relevant. Relevance in a law firm comes from measurable impact. The distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between a career that is appreciated and one that is indispensable.

✦  Inclusion drives profit. Strategy demands diversity. Leadership requires courage.
— Gaia Francieri

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Letizia Cattaneo
Communication & Marketing Manager · FIVERS Studio Legale e Tributario
Communications, Brand Strategy, Media Relations, Events, Partnerships

Letizia Cattaneo leads marketing and communications at FIVERS Studio Legale e Tributario, a role that demands a high degree of autonomy and comprehensive strategic oversight. Operating as the sole professional in this function, she is responsible for the entire lifecycle of the firm’s brand, from initial strategy to execution. Her approach is defined by agility and a deep integration into the firm’s culture, ensuring a cohesive voice across all institutional communications. Beyond the firm, she has built a robust network of female peers: a community of professionals facing similar challenges, exchanging ideas, and growing together. Her account of that network is one of the most human contributions to this report, while her description of how she supported FIVERS' strategic expansion into Energy & Infrastructure serves as a definitive example of marketing at its most strategic.

In 2025, FIVERS committed to a major expansion into Energy & Infrastructure. Cattaneo was asked to make that investment legible to the market: developing a focused communication plan, selecting the right events, building targeted partnerships, and defining a clear market positioning. The result is a 2026 marketing roadmap that positions the firm in the E&I sector with the same credibility as established competitors. It is a concrete demonstration of what it means for marketing to shape strategic decisions rather than follow them.

Working alone makes her external network structurally essential rather than merely valuable. The female peers she has found in other firms represent a reference point for shared challenges, a source of ideas, and a form of collective professional development that no internal structure can replicate in her situation. Her advice to young women entering legal marketing reflects that experience directly: embrace sharing opportunities, challenges, and everyday insights. It is the most effective way to face the profession with greater awareness and strength.

Her hard truth is the most operationally specific in this section: talk to lawyers every day. Understanding their world is your strongest asset. The distance between the marketing function and the legal function is the single largest obstacle to marketing's strategic relevance. Closing it, daily, is how the work gets done.

✦  When marketing supports lawyers, the whole firm moves forward.
— Letizia Cattaneo

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Mara Virani
Chief Marketing Officer · Jacobacci Avvocati
Marketing, Communications and BD

Mara Virani is Chief Marketing Officer at Jacobacci Avvocati, a firm where gender equality is not a policy objective but a founding characteristic: 54.5% of the partnership is female, and has been for thirty years. Her role is to translate that structural reality into measurable market impact, specifically in the pitching and beauty contest processes where clients decide which firms they trust with their most significant work. She is also responsible for making the firm's ESG commitments, including a Sustainability Management System Certification and ESG Rating Statement from an Accredia-accredited body, credible and visible in a market that is increasingly able to distinguish between certification and culture.

Virani's account of earning the strategic seat begins with a discipline that many marketing professionals skip: understanding before communicating. She spent significant time studying the history of Jacobacci Avvocati, its working methods, its organisational culture, its values. The key elements that followed, listening to partners, engaging in open dialogue, involving them actively in the process, were only possible because she had done the foundational work first. The shared language she built with the partnership was not a communication strategy. It was a genuine alignment.

On diversity in pitches, her position is structural rather than rhetorical: Jacobacci's gender balance is not a talking point to be deployed in beauty contests. It is a verifiable fact that clients can test against their own experience of the firm. Her role is to ensure that the diversity and inclusion commitments the partnership holds become measurable impact in client-facing contexts, so that what the firm claims about equality is what the client actually encounters.

Her inspiration is Silvia Hodges: one of the first professionals to introduce structured marketing to Italian law firms at a time when the integration of marketing within the legal profession was still uncommon and rarely taken seriously. Virani's career, in a sense, is the next chapter of that story.

✦  Strengthen networking among women through competence, tenacity, resilience and passion.
— Mara Virani

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Roberta De Matteo
President, MOPI Italia · MOPI — Marketing e organizzazione degli studi professionali
Strategic Growth Architecture, Market Positioning & Organisational Innovation

Roberta De Matteo is President of MOPI Italia, the professional association for marketing and business development in Italian professional services firms. That position gives her a vantage point that none of the other contributors in this section share: she sees the entire sector, across firms, across generations, across practice models. Her articulation of the paradigm shift in legal marketing is the clearest and most structurally argued in this report, and her analysis of diversity as a multiplier of quality rather than a communication lever is the kind of statement that changes how people think about the question.

De Matteo's central argument is about timing. Marketing and BD become strategic when they intervene before decisions are made, not after. When they influence the choice of sectors to invest in, the structuring of practice areas, the integration of competencies, and the definition of geographic priorities, the function has made the transition from communicating value to helping shape it. Most firms have not yet made that transition. The ones that have are structurally ahead.

On diversity, she makes the performance argument rather than the ethical one: homogeneous teams replicate established patterns. Heterogeneous teams introduce constructive tension, debate, and the ability to identify variables that might otherwise remain invisible. Firms that integrate female leadership demonstrate greater team stability, lower turnover, and stronger continuity in client relationships. Diversity is not a communication lever. It is a multiplier of quality. The distinction matters because it changes where you invest attention: not in how diversity is presented, but in whether it is real.

Her hard truth for young women is the most structural in this section: do not limit yourself to seeking space within an existing model. Train yourself to question the model itself. The next evolutionary phase of the legal profession will be defined by the people who can read the changes clearly and act on them with courage.

✦  Growing together means including, listening, and innovating with courage.
— Roberta De Matteo

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Valeria Cavallo
Brand Communication Manager · Deloitte Legal Italy
Brand Strategy, Internal & External Communication

Valeria Cavallo leads brand communication at Deloitte Legal Italy. Her engagement with MOPI, the professional association dedicated to promoting a strategic culture of marketing and communication within professional services, mirrors the direction she has been pushing throughout her career. Her account of how marketing earned its seat at the table at Deloitte Legal is a precise description of the mechanism: not by claiming strategic relevance, but by delivering it, through sector analysis, interpretation of client dynamics, pipeline monitoring, and competitive positioning that the legal function could not produce on its own.

Cavallo's turning point was the shift from producing tools to delivering insight. For years, marketing in law firms was perceived as a support function: events, materials, visibility. The seat at the table became available when the function started bringing analysis that changed how partners understood their market and their clients. When marketing contributes insight rather than execution alone, she observes, the seat becomes natural, even if it is not yet automatically granted. That last clause is important: the work of establishing strategic relevance is ongoing, not settled.

On mentoring the next generation, she focuses on three dimensions that she considers prerequisite rather than supplementary: awareness of one's own value, understanding of business dynamics, and the confidence to step forward. She encourages young professionals to write, to speak up, and to build their own thought leadership. Visibility, when grounded in expertise and substance, strengthens credibility over time. Visibility without substance does the opposite.

Her hard truth is the most business-oriented in this section: learn the business. Understand the numbers, the industries, the dynamics shaping clients' decisions. Legal marketing is no longer about communication. It is about being a strategic advisor within the firm. The preparation required for that role is the same preparation required for any strategic function: deep understanding of the context in which you operate.