Can you imagine if your lawfirm had a view over the shiny blue waters of the Adriatic Sea? What if, just next door to your office, there were beautiful white boats waiting patiently in a marina for the next trip across the Mediterranean? One lucky lawyer, Lorenzo Bacciardi (EJ Italy), works in such a place.
“We are located at the heart of Italy's shipyard industry”, says Lorenzo, “at least for yachts. Between sixty and seventy percent of all yachts produced by our country are built here, between the harbour towns of Ancona and Ravenna”. For Lorenzo, this has been a great opportunity for business, and he is one of the leading experts in legal issues related to yachts and shipyards in Italy. “Leisure boats are a huge investment”, he explains, “and they involve several manufacturers, sometimes even several buyers, because a yacht is so expensive that they may be bought by a group of people who use it together. All this requires contracts, legal provisions, and has the potential for court cases as well!”
Yachts are made of several parts that all require high technology and may be manufactured by diverse companies before they are put together at the shipyard. “This creates many warranties”, says Lorenzo, “and thus many legal documents. There is also the bonding issue, I mean, a purchaser may put in the contract that they demand that the boat reaches a certain level of performance. The shipyard then has to issue a performance bond, which is a form of guarantee. For this same reason, the payment may also be delayed: purchasers will only pay one year after they got the boat delivered, so that they have the time to see if the yacht is really up to the standards they signed for. Keep in mind that such a vessel can cost as high as twenty million Euros! So we assist buyers in every aspect: contract, payment, guarantees, paperwork, conformity...”
However, this business has been getting more difficult. After a booming period between 2003 and 2008, the shipyard industry dedicated to leisure boats in Italy has gone down. “The crisis has destroyed many manufacturers”, says Lorenzo, “but the biggest ones are still afloat, so to speak! They make the most expensive yachts and found a profitable market in Middle Eastern or Russian buyers. The fact that customers are almost always foreigners also makes this business a very international one and for us lawyers it means a lot of cross-borders expertise is needed. For example, we worked on a boat whose engineering was developed in Italy, but components manufactured in Asian countries, and the construction itself happened in Gdansk, in Poland. When you build a vessel, you start with the hull, the bottom part. Legally, you have to wait for the hull to be built before you can find more investors for your boat. But the legal definition of a finished hull differs in Italy and in Poland, for example. So that's an international legal issue for us to solve.”
Lorenzo says it is seminal to understand the industry very well if you want to work on such cases. “You must have a substantial understanding of how a ship is built. We are fortunate to live in a place where shipyards are numerous and we were one of the few lawfirms with an international outlook in this area, so that is how we got started on this.” So get ready to learn all about shipbuilding before you can work in this business...
