Lara Vischi spent 25 years in Scotland before Wright, Johnston & Mackenzie convinced her to swap banking for law. The Monfalcone native joins the firm’s Dunblane office this month as Italian Affairs Legal Administrator, tasked with untangling the knots that form when Italian wills meet Scottish estates.
The hire strengthens a practice built around a specific problem: what happens when someone with ties to both countries dies, buys property, or needs to navigate inheritance law across two jurisdictions. For the Italian community scattered across Scotland—and the Scottish families with Italian connections—the answer has often meant hiring lawyers in both countries.
That’s expensive. And slow.
Mirella Marchini has spent three decades watching this play out. The Dunblane partner, originally from Genova and qualified to practice in both Italy and Scotland, leads WJM’s Italian affairs team. “Italian legal and administrative processes require both legal understanding and practical familiarity,” she said. “By integrating dedicated Italian affairs support into our team, we are offering clients a more streamlined path through these often-complex systems.”
Vischi brings estate planning experience from her previous role in banking, where she worked with a Legal and Estates team. Now she’ll apply that knowledge to cases where Italian bureaucracy collides with Scottish property law—a collision that happens more often than most solicitors care to handle.
The firm isn’t just betting on Vischi. Kathleen Forsyth also joins as a Legal Administrator in Dunblane, reflecting broader expansion of the office’s capacity to handle intricate cross-border matters. The timing suggests demand is rising, though the firm hasn’t disclosed client numbers.
For Marchini, the investment addresses a gap she knows intimately. “There is an established population of people like myself and Lara, with Italian heritage living in Scotland and our dedicated team ensures they can access trusted legal advice covering either or both jurisdictions, and in both English and Italian, without clients having to instruct separate legal representation in each country.”
That matters when dealing with Italian wills, which follow different rules than Scottish ones. Or when someone wants to sell heritable property in one country while living in the other. Or when inheritance law in two nations produces conflicting claims on the same estate.
Between them, Marchini and Vischi have logged 55 years on Scottish soil while maintaining fluency in Italian legal and cultural norms. That combination—linguistic ability paired with practical knowledge of how Italian administrative systems actually work—is what the firm is selling.
The practice covers Scotland, the rest of the UK, and Italy. Services span property transactions, wills, estates, and inheritance matters that touch either or both jurisdictions. The bilingual approach means clients can conduct business in English or Italian, depending on comfort level.
Whether this model scales beyond Dunblane depends partly on how many other Scottish firms recognise the same opportunity. For now, WJM appears to be staking a claim on territory where legal expertise alone isn’t enough—you need to know which office to visit in Genova, and how long the paperwork actually takes.
