Legal services in Italy

I have been assisting expats for over thirty years and if you are going to live in Italy long term, you must have a savvy accountant and lawyer - these are vital!

Dear Prisiclla

In Italy its best to try and avoid lawyers as much as possible. This can be done by getting direct information from the offices. Most lawyers are not honest and especially if you are a foreigner and you do not understand they try to take as much money as possible without solving your issue. The law is always on their side and they know how to play with it. Normally you should get assistence directly from tax offices, if they can't help you then they tell you where to go. My advice would be to avoid lawyers - and if you get the necessary information you might never need a lawyer.

If you desperately need a lawyer, go through friends first or people you know.

Cheers

Unfortunately it's not so easy.

You can't get information by phone from goverment offices because they have call centers with people that only know how to send you links to the website that don't really answer your specific questions.
And that is if you're lucky enough to find someone willing to do this much and not put you on hold until you give up.

The only way is to go there physically and by than it's too late because you may need things that you don't know about from your country of origin.

You don't need a lawyer. You need to go there by yourself before deciding to move and have a translator walk with you to all the places you need to get information from.

We are in the process of applying for an elective residence visa. While we haven't used an attorney to help us through the process, we did hire an agency in Italy who's worked with the consulates in the US and is familiar with the stay permit process in Italy (they fill out all the paperwork for the latter).

We have our interview August 3 with the consulate. I'm confident having worked for 2+ months on getting all the details taken care of for the interview, we'd be sent away and asked to provide MUCH more documentation had we not hired this group. The firm has a managing attorney but the woman we've worked with almost exclusively does not have a law degree. Most importantly, she has lots of experience helping people in our position.

By far, we feel the investment has been well worth it and I'd highly recommend working with a similar group - or at minimum, talking with someone who's recently been through the process - for anyone seriously hoping to stay in Italy long-term.

One lawyer I found who declined my offer to pay him saying that it is unlikely he would be able to help  (on immigration matter, of course...) is located in Florence, and apparently is licensed both in Italy and in New York State:

Alessandro ***