Italian employment firms Toffoletto and De Luca Tamajo merge

The new firm, which will launch on 1 January, will be called Toffoletto De Luca Tamajo e Soci. As well as offices in Milan, Naples and Bergamo, the firm will open an office in Rome, led by Federica Paternò.

Toffoletto De Luca will have 18 partners, 70 lawyers and 20 support staff. Paola Tradati will be managing partner, Raffaele De Luca Tamajo will be senior partner and Franco Toffoletto chairman of the new firm.

The legacy firms have cooperated in an alliance since May 2007, sharing work, training programmes and technology. Currently Toffoletto e Soci is the Italian member firm of employment law alliance Ius Laboris, and the merged firm will hold this role too.

Tradati told The Lawyerthat the firms had not initially planned to merge, and the development had only been considered in the last few months. She added that the firm would now seek to grow organically, particularly in Rome, but new offices were unlikely.

Toffoletto said the merger was a “counter-cyclical move” which contrasted with the establishment of employment boutiques. The most recent of these saw a team including Toffoletto lawyer Sharon Reilly split off to form employment boutique the Employment Law Plant (28 October 2011).

However a number of small employment firms have merged this year with boutique Lablaw, which has taken this approach to open in Padua (6 October 2011) and Pescara, in addition to picking up Carnelutti partner Olimpio Stucchi (9 November 2011).