Hypothetical case study developed on the basis of our experience with families dealing with international matters, intended to illustrate the type of operations the Firm is able to structure and manage for clients with a similar profile; the scenario does not refer to any specific case actually handled.

A thirty-two-year-old woman, a professional in the communication sector, who for more than ten years has lived her female identity in every area of her life: social, working, emotional. She has undertaken a gender affirmation path that includes hormonal treatment followed by a specialised endocrinologist, but her identity documents still bear the male name assigned at birth. Every time she has to show her identity card, attend an interview, sign a contract or collect a registered letter, she is forced to present a document that does not correspond to the person she is. It is not just a personal discomfort: it is a condition that daily exposes her to situations of embarrassment, potential discrimination and legal vulnerability. The rectification of the name in the civil status records is the procedure that allows documents to be aligned with the person’s real identity, but the judicial path presents specific complexities that require careful preparation and a thorough knowledge of the legislation and case law on the matter.

Hypothetical case study developed on the basis of our experience with families dealing with international matters, intended to illustrate the type of operations the Firm is able to structure and manage for clients with a similar profile; the scenario does not refer to any specific case actually handled.

A forty-five-year-old man, an executive at a pharmaceutical company, who has completed a gender affirmation path lasting more than fifteen years. He obtained the judgment of rectification of the sex attribution from the Court, but he found himself facing a reality that few consider: the judgment is only the first step. The birth certificate must be updated. The identity card must be reissued. The tax code changes. The driving licence must be replaced. The degree and the diploma still bear the previous name. The employment contract, the mortgage, the insurance policy, the current account, the health card: every document of one’s life is linked to a civil registry identity that no longer exists. And every body, every institution, every office has its own procedures, its own timescales, its own resistances. Without coordinated management, the risk is to find oneself for months in a bureaucratic limbo in which some documents bear the new name and the new civil registry sex, others still the previous one, with practical consequences ranging from the impossibility of travelling to complications in banking and insurance relationships.

The Studio Legale Internazionale Boschetti successfully assisted a couple resident in Rome in a proceeding aimed at protecting the cohabitation between an Italian citizen and a foreign partner without regular documents. The case arises from the need to find a legal solution that would allow the couple to formalise their relationship and start a path of regularisation of the partner’s position on Italian territory.

The Boschetti Law Firm successfully assisted a family resident in Rome in a judicial proceeding aimed at obtaining the adoption of an adult, with the aim of formally recognising an emotional relationship that had existed for many years.

Hypothetical case study developed on the basis of our experience with families dealing with international matters, intended to illustrate the type of operations the Firm is able to structure and manage for clients with a similar profile; the scenario does not refer to any specific case actually handled.

A couple married for eight years, without children after a long path of medically assisted procreation, decides to undertake international adoption with Colombia as the reference country. A path that crosses two legal systems, three Italian institutions (Juvenile Court, local social services, Commission for International Adoptions) and the Colombian central authority (ICBF, Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar), with timescales measured in years and a procedural complexity that tests even the most determined couples. The eligibility decree to be obtained in Italy, the conferral of the mandate on the authorised body, the matching with a minor in Colombia, the compulsory period of cohabitation in the child’s country of origin, the recognition of the foreign judgment in Italy: each phase has its own rules, its own obstacles and its own timescales, and a procedural error at any step can compromise the entire path. This is the case of a couple who would go through all these phases with the legal support of our Firm, from the declaration of availability to the transcription of the adoption in the Italian registers.

Hypothetical case study developed on the basis of our experience with families dealing with international matters, intended to illustrate the type of operations the Firm is able to structure and manage for clients with a similar profile; the scenario does not refer to any specific case actually handled.

A forty-five-year-old professional, unmarried, wishes to adopt a child. The answer she receives from everyone she consults is always the same: in Italy single people cannot adopt. But that is not exactly true. Italian law provides a specific exception, art. 44, comma 1, lettera d) of Law 184/1983, which allows adoption in special cases when the impossibility of pre-adoptive fostering has been ascertained, and case law has progressively broadened the interpretation of this rule. At the international level, some countries expressly allow adoption by single persons, and the Hague Convention does not exclude it. The path exists, but it is narrow, complex and very few professionals know it in depth: it requires the identification of the right country, the eligibility decree of the Juvenile Court formulated in a way specific for a single person, an authorised body with experience in this type of adoption, and the recognition in Italy of a foreign judgment that our legal system does not provide in the ordinary form. A viable path, but only with a specialist legal competence able to move between the folds of Italian and international legislation.

Hypothetical case study developed on the basis of our experience with families dealing with international matters, intended to illustrate the type of operations the Firm is able to structure and manage for clients with a similar profile; the scenario does not refer to any specific case actually handled.

A fifty-eight-year-old man, married for twelve years to a woman who has a now thirty-year-old son born from a previous relationship. For twenty years that young man has grown up with him: he accompanied him to middle school, he helped him with high school, he took part in his graduation, he lent him the money for the down payment on his first home. But for Italian law they are nothing to each other. They are not relatives, they are not heirs, they have no mutual rights. If the stepfather were to die tomorrow, the wife’s son would inherit nothing. If the young man had an accident, the stepfather could not make medical decisions for him. A twenty-year emotional bond, real and profound, that the law simply does not recognise. The adoption of an adult person is the instrument that the Civil Code makes available to fill this void, but the proceeding is not automatic: it requires the demonstration of specific requirements, the consent of several subjects, the absence of prejudice for the adopter’s biological children, and an investigation by the Court that can hold unexpected complexities, especially when there are legitimate heirs who see their own succession expectations change.

Hypothetical case study developed on the basis of our experience with families on international matters, intended to illustrate the type of operations that the Firm is able to structure and manage for clients with a similar profile; the scenario does not refer to a specific case actually handled.

An Italian entrepreneur and his Brazilian partner have been cohabiting for three years in Milan. He is the owner of a business with significant turnover, two properties and an investment portfolio. She is in Italy with a residence permit for work reasons about to expire, without any protection of assets or inheritance in the event of a break-up or the death of the partner. A situation that concerns thousands of mixed couples in Italy: the foreign cohabitant, unlike the spouse, has no inheritance rights, does not automatically have the right to the common home, and risks losing the residence permit if the relationship ends before the renewal. What was needed was an intervention that addressed three fronts simultaneously: the regularisation of the residence permit through the registration of the de facto cohabitation, the protection of assets through a structured cohabitation agreement, and the inheritance protection through targeted testamentary provisions. Three different legal instruments, to be coordinated in a single coherent strategy.

Hypothetical case study developed on the basis of our experience with families on international matters, intended to illustrate the type of operations that the Firm is able to structure and manage for clients with a similar profile; the scenario does not refer to a specific case actually handled.

A forty-five-year-old man dies suddenly, leaving to his wife and two children a well-defined traditional estate, but also a cryptocurrency portfolio with an estimated value of over 600,000 euros of which no one knows the access keys. Bitcoin on a hardware wallet locked in a safe, Ethereum on an exchange of which the family does not have the credentials, tokens on DeFi platforms of whose existence no one was even aware, an account on a trading platform that refuses access without the two-factor authentication of the deceased holder. Assets that exist but that no one can touch. And in the meantime the value fluctuates: what today is worth 600,000 euros in three months could be worth 400,000 or 800,000. To this are added non-financial digital assets: a web domain that generates advertising revenue, a library of digital content with non-transferable personal licences, social accounts with commercial value. Digital inheritance is the new frontier of successions: assets that do not physically exist, that are in no land registry and in no securities register, that can be unrecoverable if one does not act with technical and legal competence in a short time.

Hypothetical case study developed on the basis of our experience with families dealing with international matters, intended to illustrate the type of operations the Firm is able to structure and manage for clients with a similar profile; the scenario does not refer to any specific case actually handled.

A father dies leaving a holographic will that assigns almost the entire estate to his second wife and to her children, reducing the two children of his first marriage to a symbolic bequest of 20,000 euros each on an estate exceeding three million. The two children discover that they have, in effect, been disinherited: not formally, because Italian law does not allow the disinheritance of forced heirs, but substantially, through testamentary provisions that empty out their reserved share. The law protects them with the action for reduction, a powerful but technically complex instrument: it requires the reconstruction of the deceased’s entire estate (including gifts made during his lifetime), the calculation of the breached forced share, the identification of the provisions to be reduced and the order in which to reduce them, and the actual return of the assets or their cash equivalent. An action that clashes with those who received those assets and do not intend to return them, with contested property valuations, with hidden gifts to be reconstructed, and with a limitation period that is running. This is the case of two brothers who would entrust our Firm with the protection of the rights that their father’s will had attempted to erase.