Studio Legale Sutti was founded in 1953 by Dr. Angelo Sutti, Knight of the Italian Republic, as an Italian law firm with a strong focus on Company-Commercial Law and Intellectual property & Competition Law, offering its services to local businesses and entrepreneurs.
In the late seventies the Firm began an uninterrupted growth cycle, making it eventually one of the ten largest Italian firms, according to a number of independent sources (see for instance the front page of the Wall Street Journal 27/10/1998, or, in Italy, the surveys published by Il Mondo 23/04/1999, ItaliaOggi 03/02/2000, Lombard – The Italian Magazine of International Finance 01/02/2003).
As part of this process, SLS established a Labour & Related Matters Department with its own premises, staffed by lawyers who had already collaborated with the Firm in this area for a number of years. Thus, the Firm was dramatically reorganised – profiting also from an early investment in state-of-the-art IT infrastructures – into a structure based on firm-wide departments, which is still in place.
In the mid-Eighties, SLS’s practice, while retaining most of its original features – including its emphasis on human resources and teamwork, its commitment to excellence in dispute resolution and its loyalty to a substantial core of domestic clientele – became increasingly involved in the international arena, and began interviewing foreign candidates in its recruitment operations. This also led the Firm to establish in 1992 its two first representation offices abroad, namely in London and Tokyo, offering the Firm’s services to the local markets; and to participate actively to the life of a number of foreign chambers of commerce and trade associations in Italy.
The domestic operation of SLS, which had already included two regional offices serving Northern Italy, respectively situated in the area of Bergamo and Brescia (originally in Trescore Balneario) and in the area of Pavia and the southern Milanese province (in Abbiategrasso), was significantly reinforced in 1993, when the Firm merged with Monti & Partners – another well-known Milan-based law firm active since 1927 in international investments and trade matters, as well as banking and financial law -, and moved its Head Office to the current prestigious premises in Milan, via Montenapoleone 8.
The merged firm kept the name Studio Legale Sutti, while Marco Monti, formerly Senior Partner of Monti & Partners, became the new Senior Partner after the premature death of Angelo Sutti. Guido Monti, who founded Monti & Partners and had been its Senior Partner until 1975, remained Of Counsel to Studio Legale Sutti until the age of ninety-eight and 2002, as the dean of Milan Bar and one of the oldest practising lawyer in Italy.
The new century brought, inter alia, the collaboration of prestigious scholars (see Il Giorno, 10/03/2000; ItaliaOggi, 23/02/2000, “Studio Legale Sutti, arruolati Ballarino e Ghidini”; The Lawyer, 31/07/2000, “SLS Recruits Scholars”; ICCLAW News, 14/07/2000, “Sutti Welcomes Leading Scholars”; and, with respect to Prof. Bruno Sassani, The Lawyer, 29/04/02, “Studio Legale Sutti Grows Dispute Resolution with Rome Hire”; Legal Week, 25/04/02 “Sutti Boosts Presence in Rome with Boutique buy”; Italian-American Business, April 2002, “New Appointment at Studio Legale Sutti”; Il Mondo, 10/05/2002, “Sassani’s Supreme Court Advocacy with Sutti in Rome”; International Law Office Newsletter 04/2002; Britaly 05/2002, “SLS Relocates its Office in Rome and Welcomes Professor Sassani”; European Legal Business 05/2002; Deutschland-Italia, “SLS strukturiert sein Büro in Rom neu and begrüßt in seinen Reihen Ordinarius fur Zivilprozessrecht”).
New Italian offices were established in the same period, respectively in Rome; Monza; and Genoa, where SLS was honoured to be joined by the partners and associates of Studio Pennisi.
In the meantime, SLS had become both an interdisciplinary and international firm, having welcomed patent attorneys and tax advisors (“commercialisti“) to its ranks and established the single largest practice of South-Eastern Europe (in terms of human resources, territorial coverage and turnover). In particular, further to mergers with local leading players, the Firm started operating its own offices in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), Romania, Croatia, increasingly representing a point of reference with respect to investment and trade involving that part of the world.
In 2003, the 50th anniversary of the foundation of Studio Legale Sutti was celebrated with a reception held on September 15th in San Francisco and with the re-organisation of our tax practice into a fourth department.
In August 2004, Studio Legale Sutti, already unique amongst local business full-service firms for its vibrant industrial property practice, was the first Italy-headquartered law firm to register its stylised “SLS” logo as a trademark in various countries, including Japan.
