Avocat à la Cour,
Maître Cora Maglo

There are lawyers you consult, and lawyers you keep. Cora Maglo belongs to the second kind. An Avocat à la Cour admitted to Liste I of the Luxembourg Bar since 2009, she founded Cerno Law Firm on a simple and demanding conviction: the person who listens to a matter must be the one who carries it through.

Her education gave her three ways of reading the law. Strasbourg first, for civil-law rigour. The London School of Economics next, for the pragmatic cast of common-law private law. Tours last, for international business law, which knows no borders. In Luxembourg, where an ordinary matter brings together a company incorporated locally, a French director, a German bank and a British investor, this threefold reading is no ornament on a résumé. It is a daily working tool.

She then learned the craft in two of the most demanding houses on the market. In the corporate department of Clifford Chance Luxembourg, she acquired the art of structuring: anticipate, draft, secure. In the litigation department of Bonn Steichen & Partners, she learned the other side, that of procedure and the courtroom, where strategy plays out in real time. Few lawyers master both registers. She brought them together by founding her own firm.

Defending a client begins with listening to them. At Cerno Law Firm, the lawyer who receives their words and knows their file is the one who carries their voice into the courtroom. That continuity is the ground of our commitment: a defence embodied, engaged, and faithful to their interests.

Cerno Law Firm was born of a refusal of the tiered firm, where the first meeting and the pleading are entrusted to different hands. An independent, multilingual practice on boulevard de la Pétrusse, it supports companies across the whole life cycle of their business, and individuals at the moments that decide a life: moving to Luxembourg, a work permit, a nationality, a contested dismissal, a separation, a debt to recover. Fees there are quoted before any work begins. Not as a posture, but because a lawyer who cannot say how they bill does not yet have command of your matter.

In 2022 she made a choice few litigators dare: training in collaborative law with the AFPDC, a method in which the parties and their lawyers undertake by contract to seek a negotiated solution before any court. For a lawyer trained in litigation, this is not a renunciation. It is the recognition that a dispute is sometimes won by not bringing it, and that the strength of counsel is measured also by its restraint.

She advises in Luxembourgish, French, German, English, Spanish and Italian. A member of the Institut Luxembourgeois des Administrateurs, the ALJB, LILLA and the ALMJ, she anchors her practice in the networks where Luxembourg law is built, and her firm in the European Immigration Lawyers Network and the AEA International Lawyers Network. What defines her, in the end, fits in one sentence her clients remember: she listens first, she structures next, and she does not let go.