Hiring a lawyer in another country, in a legal system built differently from the one you know, is harder to judge than hiring one at home. You cannot rely on the usual signals — a local reputation you already trust, a bar you understand, a fee structure you have seen before. A short list of direct questions, asked before anything is signed, closes most of that gap.
Who exactly will handle the file
Italian firms, like firms anywhere, vary in how much of the work the named partner actually does versus delegates. Ask directly who will draft the documents, who will appear if there is a hearing, and who to contact day to day. This is not a sign of distrust — it is the same question worth asking of any firm, and a firm confident in its structure answers it without hesitation.
What governs the fee, and what it does not cover
Italian legal fees are usually set by agreement, sometimes referencing the parametri forensi — court-set benchmarks that a judge would apply anyway when ordering the losing side to pay the winner's costs. Ask for the fee structure in writing before instructing: whether it is fixed, hourly, tied to a result, or some mix, and separately, what expenses are billed on top — court filing fees, expert reports, translations, apostilles. A clear answer to this before the engagement starts avoids the most common source of friction afterward.
How communication will actually work
A case run in Italian, for a client who does not read Italian, needs an explicit answer to a mundane question: will documents be summarized in English as they arrive, translated in full, or left for the client to have translated independently? None of these is wrong, but each has a different cost and a different speed, and assuming one while the firm assumes another causes real delay later.
What happens across time zones
Ask how the firm handles a client six, nine, or fourteen hours away — whether there is a standing time for calls, how quickly emails are answered, and who covers if the lead lawyer is in an Italian court (where phones are typically off) during your business hours. This matters more in litigation, where a filing deadline can fall while the client is asleep, than in a one-off transaction.
Conflicts, and who is actually qualified for what
Ask whether the firm, or anyone in it, has acted for the other side of the matter, for a family member involved in it, or for a business connected to it — an Italian estate dispute in particular can pull in cousins, in-laws, and co-heirs the firm has represented on something unrelated years earlier. A firm that runs this check and says so plainly, rather than waiting to be asked, is worth noting for that reason alone.
Separately, ask about qualification. An Italian lawyer (avvocato) is admitted to an Italian bar (ordine degli avvocati) and can appear before Italian courts; that is a different qualification from a US bar admission or an LL.M., and neither substitutes for the other. If part of the matter runs through a US court or agency as well as an Italian one, ask directly whether the firm handles that side itself, through a US-qualified lawyer on staff, or by coordinating with separate US counsel — and if the latter, how the two firms stay in sync so nothing falls between them.
Whether the matter needs an Italian lawyer at all
Not every question with "Italy" in it needs Italian counsel. A dispute genuinely governed by another country's law, or a matter that a notary or an accountant handles more directly than a lawyer, is worth naming as such. A firm that says plainly "this part does not need us" before billing for it is giving away, for free, the clearest signal of how it will behave once it is billing for something real.
What has already gone wrong, if anything has
If you are approaching a lawyer after something has already gone sideways — a missed deadline, a document lost in translation, a deal that stalled — say so at the first conversation, not after the engagement letter is signed. It changes what can still be done and what cannot, and an honest answer about which category a problem falls into is worth more at that stage than reassurance.
Where this fits before a first meeting
These questions are worth having answered before, not during, the first substantive conversation about the matter itself. That first conversation looks different depending on what brought you to Italian counsel in the first place — a company dispute, as in cross-border legal counsel for Italy and the US, or ongoing business needs, as in the legal advice Italian companies actually need — but the questions above hold regardless of which one it is. Every engagement still turns on its own facts, and that first conversation is where those get reviewed.