Att. Dr. Dr. Virginie Tassin Campanella

Att. Dr. Dr. Virginie Tassin Campanella is the Founder and Managing Director of VTA Tassin, a public international law firm dedicated entirely to the law of the sea, with offices in the Zurich area of Switzerland and in Paris. Under her leadership the firm has been recognised as Sea & Ocean Law Firm of the Year in Switzerland at the Corporate INTL Global Awards 2025, an award that reflects its unique specialisation and her own standing as one of the field's most distinguished practitioners. The recognition affirms the firm's position as a pioneer in a highly specialised area of international law.

Founded in 2016, VTA Tassin describes itself as the first public international law firm solely dedicated to oceans and seas, devoting the whole of its activity to the law of the sea and to marine environmental management and resource protection. The firm advises governments, international organisations and private-sector clients, and it structures its work around legal, policy and business monitoring, research and advice, representation before institutions and at meetings and events, the creation and development of projects and partnerships, and tailored capacity-building and training programmes. Its practice sits deliberately at what the firm calls the science, policy and business nexus, spanning both traditional and emerging areas of the ocean economy.

The firm's focus on sea and ocean law is exceptionally rare, and it responds to a growing need as states and organisations grapple with the governance of maritime spaces, the protection of the marine environment and the sustainable use of ocean resources. VTA Tassin's client base of public and private entities reflects this breadth, encompassing those concerned with marine resource development, environmental protection and the implementation of the rule of law at sea. By concentrating exclusively on this discipline, the firm offers a depth of expertise that generalist practices cannot readily match. The governance of the oceans has moved rapidly up the international agenda, and specialist advice in this area is in growing demand among states and organisations alike.

Virginie Tassin Campanella brings extraordinary credentials to this work. She is an Avocat à la Cour admitted to the Paris Bar in 2016 and an EU/EFTA attorney-at-law admitted to the Zürich Bar in 2020, and she holds double doctorates in law from the Sorbonne and the University of Melbourne. Earlier in her career she served as an associate legal officer at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, where she worked on landmark matters including the 2011 Seabed Advisory Opinion, the Bangladesh and Myanmar maritime boundary case, and the M/V Louisa and M/V Virginia G cases. This tribunal experience gives her a rare, practical command of how the law of the sea operates at the highest level.

Her standing in the field extends well beyond her firm. Named Attorney of the Ocean by a leading French financial newspaper in 2013, she is a multi-award-winning attorney and researcher, a member of ABLOS and President of the Scientific Council of the Law of the Sea Institute of Monaco, and the author of more than thirty research articles and three books on the law of the sea. This combination of scholarship, institutional engagement and practical advocacy underpins the firm's authority. The naming of VTA Tassin as Sea & Ocean Law Firm of the Year in Switzerland at the Corporate INTL Global Awards 2025 recognises that singular expertise and the pioneering role Virginie Tassin Campanella has played in establishing a practice devoted wholly to the oceans and seas.