If you came to Liberty Legal for a Portugal Golden Visa, a D7 Visa, or an Italy Investor Visa, the firm you’re working with hasn’t changed. Its name has. For twenty years, the firm many families still know as Liberty Legal has helped people move, work, and build a life across borders. This year, the name caught up with the work: Liberty Legal is now Liberty, and the change says more about where the firm is headed than it might first appear.
A name that stopped fitting
“We grew out of the old name,” is how founder Madalena Monteiro puts it. Liberty Legal described a practice: a lawyer helping clients file for a Portugal Golden Visa or a D7 Visa, an Italy Investor Visa specialist walking a family through an Italian citizenship application. That description was accurate, and it was also incomplete.
The legal filing is rarely the hard part of relocating a family across three jurisdictions. What actually determines whether the move works is everything that happens after the visa is approved: the tax number, the school enrollment that quietly decides which town a family ends up living in, the local bank account, the driving licence exchange. None of that is legal work in the traditional sense, but all of it decides whether the legal work was worth doing in the first place.
Liberty is the name for that fuller scope. Same team, same 1,000+ families, a name that actually describes what happens between “visa approved” and “settled.” You can read more about the firm and its history on the Firm page.
What changed, and what didn’t for Portugal Golden Visa Clients
The legal foundation hasn’t moved. Liberty still handles the cases that built its reputation, in Portugal and in Italy:
- Golden Visa, D7 Visa, D8 Visa, and Startup Visa applications for families and entrepreneurs relocating to Portugal
- Italy Investor Visa, Elective Residence and Digital Nomad routes for clients choosing Italy
- Italian citizenship applications, including cases that run alongside a broader relocation
- Portuguese citizenship after residency, for families completing the path they started years earlier
What’s new is the infrastructure around that work. This year Liberty opened a third office, in Beverly Hills, adding a US base to its existing offices in Lisbon and Milan. Fourteen people now work across three offices and two continents, on the same caseload of families that trusted the firm under its old name.
That geographic spread matters for a specific reason: a lawyer handling a Portugal Golden Visa application from Lisbon alone can get a client through the process, but a family managing life across Portugal, Italy, and the US benefits from a firm that has people, not just correspondents, in each place.
Why the timing makes sense
Investment migration has a way of teaching firms this lesson eventually. A client’s file doesn’t close when the residence permit is issued. It stays open through the school year, the first tax return, the first renewal, sometimes for a decade or more. A firm’s name should describe the length of that relationship, not just its opening chapter.
Liberty Legal was a fair name in year one. By year twenty, with three offices, two continents, and more than a thousand families still relying on the same team, it had stopped being the full picture. Liberty is the attempt to close that gap.
Evaluating a Portugal Golden Visa or D7 Visa? Here’s what to ask
If you’re comparing options for a Portugal Golden Visa, a D7 Visa, or an Italy Investor Visa, the name on the letterhead matters less than what happens after approval. Worth asking any firm you’re considering: who handles the tax registration, the school search, the bank account, once the visa itself is no longer the open question. That’s the work Liberty built its second decade around, and it’s the reason a Liberty Legal client from 2015 is still a Liberty client today.
Explore Liberty’s Portugal and Italy practice areas, read more on Insights, or start the conversation about your own move.