Herbert Smith Freehills has bolstered its technology, media and telecoms (TMT) and competition regulatory and trade (CRT) platforms with the hire of Andrea Appella as a Consultant in the firm’s Milan office.
A qualified lawyer and solicitor, Andrea brings a wealth of experience from 25 years of in-house practice in the creative industries (audio-visual/media/technology) on an international scale, specialising in competition, intellectual property and regulatory law, most recently as Head of Global Competition at Netflix. His previous roles in-house include Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at News Corporation/21st Century Fox, Vice President and Associate General Counsel at Warner Bros/Time Warner, and Director at MTV Europe.
He has worked on a wide range of mergers and acquisitions (most recently Fox/Disney), competition proceedings, market and regulatory investigations, copyright and digital single market policy and regulation, regulation of audio-visual media services and digital platforms, and artificial intelligence. During his tenure in international groups, Andrea undertook significant assignments across all media sectors (movies, TV networks, pay-tv platforms, music, sport, publishing, news, online streaming, digital platforms), providing advice and counsel on some of the most transformational competition and regulatory cases, as well as legislative developments that have shaped the audio-visual and creative industry over the last decades. He was featured in Global Competition Review’s list of top in-house antitrust lawyers in the world (Corporate Counsel 2019) and among the “Stars of the In-House Competition Bar” in Global Competition Review (March 2005).
Prior to his in-house career, Andrea was a lawyer at Herbert Smith Freehills, where he started his career and practised until 1997.
Andrea also held the institutional role of Director of International Affairs at the UK Office of Fair Trading (the predecessor of the Competition and Markets Authority), where he managed relations with the European Commission, the OECD and the International Competition Network. He was co-chair of the Antitrust Committee of the International Bar Association and is currently a non-governmental advisor to the International Competition Network. He has recently collaborated with the Italian Ministry of Culture.
He is currently a Visiting Professor at King’s College London, where he teaches “Competition and Intellectual Property in the Media Industry: Law and Practice” on the Master in Law (LLM) programme. He is also a member of the ICPC (Innovation, Competition and Regulation Policy Centre) at the European University of Rome and of the Steering Committee of the Next Generation Lawyers course in partnership with LuceLabCinecittĂ and the high-level training company BeRight.
