Christopher J. Morvillo of Clifford Chance. Courtesy photo

Clifford Chance partner Christopher J. Morvillo has been reported missing after it emerged he was among those on board when tech tycoon Mike Lynch's yacht sunk off the coast of Sicily, Italy yesterday.

Sicily's Civil Protection Department said that Morvillo was among the 22 people reported missing, according to national reports, alongside his wife Neda, Lynch and his daughter Hannah, Morgan Stanley Bank's international chairman, Jonathan Bloomer, and his wife Judy Bloomer.

It had also been reported that Ayla Ronald, a London-based, New Zealand-qualified senior associate at Clifford Chance is among those to have been rescued.

A Clifford Chance spokesperson said the firm was "in shock and deeply saddened by this tragic incident".

Who is Christopher Morvillo?

Morvillo is a renowned white-collar crime partner who has been based in Clifford Chance's New York office since 2011.

He has a distinguished resume that includes serving as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York between 1999 and 2005.

He also assisted in the criminal investigation that arose out of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to Clifford Chance's website.

Before that, he spent six years as a partner at New York white collar defence outfit Morvillo Abramowitz Grand Iason Anello & Bohrer. In the 1990s he also had a five-year stint at Weil Gotshal & Manges.

He has since made a name for himself representing high-profile businesspeople embroiled in legal wrangles with various public authorities. For this work, he was twice named as a Law.com litigator of the week, most recently for his work with Lynch.

Morvillo has had a close association with Autonomy founder and former CEO Lynch for some years. As recently as June, he helped Lynch secure an acquittal following a three-month trial in which Lynch and others were charged with inflating revenues in the run-up to the software company's $11.7 billion acquisition by Hewlett-Packard in 2011.

He was also in 2018 named litigator of the week after he won a huge ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in a case of first impression involving the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Morvillo was part of the Clifford Chance team that acted for Lawrence Hoskins, a British national who worked for French industrial conglomerate Alstom. In 2022, a U.S. court upheld Hoskins' post-trial acquittal on Foreign Corrupt Practices Act charges tied to a scheme to bribe Indonesian officials to secure a $118 million power contract.

Lynch was an early pioneer of the legal tech movement, having backed Luminance—a legal tech company previously tied to Slaughter and May—through his investment firm Invoke Capital.

A Clifford Chance spokesperson said in a statement: "We are in shock and deeply saddened by this tragic incident. Our thoughts are with our partner, Christopher Morvillo, and his wife Neda who are among the missing.

"Our utmost priority is providing support to the family as well as our colleague Ayla Ronald, who together with her partner, thankfully survived the incident. Our thoughts extend to the other passengers and crew and all those affected. We have no further comment at this time. We, and the families, ask that their request for privacy is honored during this period."

The Civil Protection Department of the Italian government referred Law.com to the Territorial Office of the Government of Palermo, which had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.