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.
