We help you define a just goal and apply advocacy to attain it

Mission

Our mission is to serve justice through disciplined advocacy. We defend clients against injustice, work to redress wrongs committed against them, and help them achieve just arrangements with counterparties, regulators, and other stakeholders.

How We Work

We begin by helping the client clarify the nature of the problem. Not every difficulty is, at first, a legal problem; and not every legal problem is best answered by immediate confrontation. We work with the client to refine the formulation of the legal need, identify the objective sought, and determine whether a legal solution is required.

Once the objective is clear, we help formulate a strategy to achieve it. That strategy must be legally sound, commercially realistic, and ordered toward a just outcome. This may require serious dialogue with the client about motives, risks, counterparties, and the difference between merely obtaining an advantage and achieving a resolution that can properly stand.

We then advocate for the client’s lawful interests. Sometimes that means helping the client reach a strong and durable agreement with a counterparty. Sometimes it means resisting an unjust claim, pursuing redress, or litigating against an injustice committed against the client.

Much of our work is transcultural. We help clients operate across legal systems, languages, customs, and commercial expectations. Where friction arises from misunderstanding, we work to clarify. Where it arises from injustice, we act.

Our Clients

We are selective in the matters we accept. We seek clients who are genuinely interested in achieving justice and who are willing, where necessary, to examine their own motivations and objectives in dialogue with counsel. In commercial matters, we encourage clients to pursue arrangements that are sound, durable, and properly favorable to both sides. Each accepted assignment reflects a common understanding between client and advocate as to the wrong to be addressed, the objectives to be pursued, and the means by which those objectives may properly be achieved.

Our Advocates

We are highly selective in the advocates with whom we work. We require not only technical excellence, demonstrated through academic achievement, professional reputation, and substantive recognition, but also the habits of judgment that legal advocacy demands.

Our advocates are expected to possess continuous intellectual seriousness: a genuine and sustained engagement with law, history, culture, philosophy, and the liberal arts. This is not ornamental. It is part of the formation required for sound judgment, clear speech, moral courage, and faithful representation.

St. James Society seeks advocates who can think deeply, speak candidly, resist fear, avoid empty aggression, and pursue justice with discipline.

Our Work and Style

We act in commercial and private matters, particularly where the issues are cross-border, intercontinental, or otherwise unsuited to purely local handling. We have a strong preference for representing individuals, families, founders, and closely held enterprises, especially where legal questions are bound up with judgment, trust, reputation, and long-term consequences.

Our work combines a pragmatic American approach to advocacy and problem-solving with European subtlety, discretion, and finesse. We are comfortable operating across legal systems, cultures, and commercial expectations, helping clients pursue just and workable outcomes in matters that do not fit neatly within a single jurisdiction.

Words from the Founding Advocate

If you lead a business and are looking to co-create value with a business partner; if you have been disappointed or harmed by someone who has broken your trust; if you seek nothing more and nothing less than a fair deal or a just outcome; and if your matter involves cross-border issues, partners, or consequences, I would like to hear from you.

I am building this practice as a place where some of the brightest people in Europe and the United States, with a true vocation for justice, can exercise their sacred duties: helping businesses led by people with a mission to create value for society, and helping those who have been unjustly injured obtain redress.

I vow to do my best to connect those whom I trust to discharge these duties with those who come to me to be entrusted to their care.

We will perform these services with humility toward our Creator, loyalty to your interests, and the vigorous application of our energies to secure a fair outcome for you.

Federico Salinas
Founding Advocate, St. James Society

About Federico Salinas

Fed is an international lawyer admitted in New York and England & Wales, and registered as a European lawyer in Ireland. His professional formation includes some of the most coveted credentials in international law and finance: he has served as an equity partner at three leading AmLaw 25 law firms, working in capital markets, private equity, and international finance across New York, London, Dubai, Warsaw, and Moscow. He holds a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Yet the practice of law at that level left him deeply unsatisfied. Too often, the link between legal work and justice appeared uncertain, remote, or invisible. St. James Society was founded from that dissatisfaction, and from the conviction that the best legal minds should not be formed merely for prestige, profit, or institutional advancement, but for the service of justice.

Federico is building St. James Society as a place where advocates of exceptional ability, serious formation, and a true vocation for justice can serve clients whose matters require judgment, courage, and disciplined attention. The Society seeks to assist businesses led by people with a mission to create value for society, and individuals, families, founders, and communities who have been injured unjustly and seek fair redress.

This work imposes obligations on advocates themselves. Those entrusted with the matters of others must strive to order their own lives so that they may serve with clarity, steadiness, and freedom from unnecessary distraction. They must continually develop their powers of dialogue, so as to grow in understanding, and their powers of speech and advocacy, so as to resist sophistry, clarify truth, and defend the client’s just interests with discipline.

Federico understands the founding of St. James Society not as a personal monument, but as an act of stewardship: an effort to gather advocates and clients around the disciplined pursuit of just outcomes.

Formation and Educational Work

St. James Society is rooted in the conviction that legal advocacy requires more than technical competence. The advocate must be formed as a whole person: capable of attention, memory, judgment, dialogue, disciplined speech, courage, humility, and love of truth.

For this reason, Federico is also involved in educational initiatives, particularly, though not exclusively, for lawyers and for those considering the vocation of law. These initiatives are not separate from the spirit of St. James Society. They express the same underlying belief: that those who would serve justice must first become capable of seeing reality clearly, speaking truthfully, and entering into serious dialogue with others.

One of these initiatives is Road 273, a community for serious dialogue over the Great Books of Western civilization. Road 273 brings together thoughtful participants for regular discussion of foundational texts in history, philosophy, literature, politics, and theology. Its purpose is not merely to read, but to cultivate disciplined conversation, intellectual friendship, careful attention to texts, and the shared pursuit of understanding.

Another is the St. James Institute in Caltagirone, Sicily: a proposed residential and online school of classical learning. The Institute is conceived as a place where adults and serious students may encounter the Great Books within an integrated humanist curriculum, while also experiencing Sicily as a living classroom of art, architecture, history, language, music, cuisine, beauty, hospitality, and conversation.

The educational philosophy behind these projects is set out in Federico’s Italian manifesto, Capaci della realtà: Manifesto per un’educazione dialogica. The manifesto argues that education is not merely the transmission of information, technical training, or preparation for work. Its deeper purpose is to form human beings capable of knowing reality, loving truth, judging wisely, and discovering truth together with others.

This philosophy informs St. James Society’s understanding of advocacy. The advocate must become capable of reality in order to serve justice within it. Legal work, at its highest level, is therefore not merely a professional service. It is a disciplined exercise of judgment, speech, and courage in the service of a just outcome.

For Prospective Clients

Prospective clients may begin by completing our private consultation form or by booking a direct video consultation.

The private consultation form is the most efficient way to provide the essential facts, identify the relevant parties and jurisdictions, explain the objective sought, and allow us to determine whether St. James Society may be able to assist.

A direct video consultation may be appropriate where the matter is sensitive, urgent, complex, or difficult to explain in writing. Direct consultations are charged at €350 for a 30-minute consultation.

Submitting a form or booking a consultation does not create an attorney-client relationship. Representation begins only after conflict checks are completed and an engagement is confirmed in writing.

For Advocates

St. James Society is open to hearing from lawyers and advocates at any stage of professional life, provided they possess exceptional formation, serious intellectual habits, and a genuine commitment to the service of justice.

The Society is not intended as a loose referral network. It is a community of advocates ordered toward the disciplined pursuit of just objectives. Those who seek association with the Society should be able to respect its spiritual foundation, its commitment to justice, and its understanding of advocacy as a vocation of judgment, speech, courage, and service.

Lawyers interested in possible association are invited to introduce themselves by email.

Contact: fed@sjs.law