Italian lawyer honoured at World Lawyers Forum in Amsterdam
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25 September 2026
AMSTERDAM — Italian lawyer Massimo Pignatiello, managing partner of Donatiello & Pignatiello International Law Firm, received the World Lawyers Forum's "In Grateful Recognition" award for his contribution to the forum, at the organisation's 25th European edition held at the Park Plaza Victoria in Amsterdam this month.
Avv. Pignatiello spoke in the forum's Litigation Track, on a panel titled "International Arbitration & Dispute Resolution: Key Developments & Practice Shifts", alongside Joe Tirado of TiradoADR in London and Xiaoqing Chu of the Chinese firm Jincheng Tongda & Neal. The session was moderated by Edith N. Nordmann, managing partner of ACG International in Amsterdam.
The Italian lawyer's contribution centred on enforcement, and on the gap between winning a case and recovering the money. Cross-border disputes, he argued, are rarely lost on the merits alone -- they are lost on the wrong seat of arbitration, on an enforcement strategy devised too late, or on assets that have already been moved one jurisdiction too far.
"It is no longer just 'Can we win?'," Avv. Pignatiello told the panel. "It is 'Where do we fight, and can we actually collect?'"
He added the Italian perspective to the discussion, pointing in particular to the effect of insolvency proceedings, which can add a further layer of uncertainty to disputes already spread across several legal systems, and often decide the practical outcome long before any court rules on the substance.
Other panellists took the debate in different directions. Tirado set out the greater certainty mediation can offer compared with cross-border litigation and enforcement, arguing that at the end of a successful mediation a party knows what it has, rather than facing further uncertainty over proceedings, enforcement and eventual recovery. Chu described how Chinese evidentiary rules require evidence originating from hardware to be examined and verified in proceedings to establish its authenticity, a point that drew interest in a period when artificial intelligence is making it harder to determine what is genuine.
The audience pushed the discussion further onto artificial intelligence, raising not only the legal and ethical questions but a practical one: if AI changes the way lawyers work, how should that be reflected in the way legal services are billed. Nordmann closed the session by asking each panellist what single change they would make to the current international dispute resolution system, a question she later described as harder to answer than she had expected.
Donatiello & Pignatiello is a boutique international practice with offices in Rome, Geneva, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Istanbul, London and The Hague. Its work covers cross-border litigation, international arbitration, multi-jurisdictional debt recovery and corporate structuring for foreign investors.
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