After more than a decade of practice and more than 1,000 families now settled in Portugal and Italy, Liberty is widening what it offers them.
The firm has opened offices in Beverly Hills and built a destination services practice, the industry’s term for everything that begins where immigration law stops, and taken the occasion to do something it had been putting off for years: Put its own name in order. Liberty Legal is now, simply, Liberty, online at www.libertylex.com.
Those three moves are really one decision. More and more of Liberty’s families are American, and the conversation that settles a move to Europe happens in a living room in Los Angeles, usually months before anyone books a scouting trip.
Much of the work is quiet, and it holds up everything else. It covers the tax number and the bank account in the order the system quietly insists upon, property purchases against a written brief, school placement with an education map attached, health service registration with a list of English-speaking doctors, the driving license exchange, utilities, and address certification.
None of that is immigration law. All of it decides whether the immigration law was worth doing.
Madalena Monteiro, who founded the firm, describes the expansion as closing a gap she had watched families fall into for years. Clients, she argues, were never really buying a permit: “They were buying a life, and we were handing them a document and wishing them luck. At some point that stops being modesty and starts being a hole in the service.”
On the new name, Monteiro is equally direct. ‘’We grew out of the old name’’. Liberty Legal described a practice. Liberty describes what we actually do for a Family across three jurisdictions and twenty years of their lives. The house got bigger, so we changed the sign. To reflect the reality the holistic support that we provide to our clients.
Two Countries, One Conversation
Liberty has run Portuguese and Italian programs alongside each other for years, and that pairing matters more now than it did when the firm built it.
Portugal’s route takes €500,000 into a CMVM-regulated fund or a minimum of €200,000 in a GEPAC-certified eligible cultural project; real estate stopped qualifying in October 2023, and most non-EU nationals now wait 10 years for a passport.
Italy’s investor visa excludes real estate too, opening at €250,000 for an innovative startup and rising to €500,000 for equity in an Italian company or €2 million in government bonds, with no minimum stay attached at all.
Tax is where the two genuinely diverge. In Portugal, the successor to the Non-Habitual Resident regime attaches to what a person does for a living, rather than to what they own. Qualifying professional income is taxed at a flat tax rate of 20% for ten years, and most important foreign-source income is exempt, with pensioners left outside.
Italy’s Article 24-bis flat tax replaces ordinary taxation on all foreign income for one fixed annual sum, raised to €300,000 for anyone transferring residence from January 2026, plus €50,000 per family member, among other tax incentives.
Which country suits a family is arithmetic as much as romance. A flat sum beats a percentage above a certain income and loses badly below it.
Maria Teresa Vanacore, a partner at the firm who qualified in Italy and spent 15 years in immigration and corporate relocation, sits on the Italian side of that comparison. Most people, in her experience, arrive having already decided: “They choose the country they have holidayed in. Then we run the numbers, and roughly a third of them change their minds, happily.”
Getting the Order Right
Liberty’s argument is not that the individual tasks are hard. It is that they interlock, and that the sequence carries dates.
Choose a school, and you have chosen a town. Choosing the town then settles the commute, the lease, and the month a family becomes tax resident, which decides which regime looks after them for the following decade.
Relocation, in Vanacore’s framing, “is a sequence, not a checklist,” and it is generous to anyone who respects the order: “Get it right and the rest is administration. Get it wrong and you are unwinding decisions that were expensive to make.”
One couple in their late sixties came to the firm with their neighborhood already chosen from photographs, a fourth-floor walk-up with no elevator, 25 minutes from the nearest hospital with a cardiology unit. Liberty rebuilt the brief around a kinder question: What did they want to still be doing at 82?
They live on the Cascais line now, six minutes on foot from a station, with an elevator, a level entrance, and a pharmacy on the corner. Their view is smaller. Everything else about it fits.
Smaller mercies get handled early. Legal residency in Portugal opens a 90-day window in which a US driving license has to be entered for exchange, and families who file inside it keep driving while the paperwork moves.
The People Behind It
Liberty is now 14 people working in Portuguese, Italian and English across Lisbon, Milan and Beverly Hills. It did not start anywhere near that size, and the growth is the whole argument for the new name. A one-person immigration practice can call itself Legal and describe itself accurately.
A trilingual team in two continents, running two investment programs, and supporting more then 1000 investors and its family members, cannot.
Monteiro herself didn’t set out to do any of this. She began in litigation and moved across immigration, where the work meant helping someone turn a plan into an address, which she calls the most rewarding thing she knows.
The firm’s convictions became a matter of public record in 2025. When Parliament moved to stretch naturalization timelines and to start the clock at the issuance of the residence permit rather than the date of application, Liberty commissioned a constitutional opinion from the principal author of the Portuguese Constitution and a fellow constitutional scholar, then filed an amicus curiae brief before the Constitutional Court in December on behalf of Golden Visa investors.
Four of the challenged provisions fell in Acórdão 1133/2025. Longer timelines survived, and a revised text was promulgated in May 2026.
Monteiro has not moved off the principle. “A country is entitled to change its immigration policy,” she argues. “It is not entitled to change the rules in the middle of the game and apply them backwards to people who kept their side of the bargain.”
Borrowing an interviewer’s phrase, she still describes herself as an optimist in Lisbon. Optimism of that variety turns out to be practical: Anyone willing to take the State to court over a broken promise is unlikely to shrug at a school waitlist.
Why Beverly Hills
Portugal closed 2024 with 1,543,697 foreign residents on its books, nearly four times the 2017 count. Of the 2,081 investment permits granted that year, most went to nationals of the United States, China, and Russia, in that order.
Interest on that scale has outgrown the old arrangement, in which a European firm waits for the phone to ring from eight time zones away. Bel Air puts Liberty in the room where these decisions really get made, and that room is a living room.
The thinking now happens on the American side and the doing on the European one. Country choice, tax modeling, curriculum conversations, and school shortlists come first; the tax number, the lease, the health card, and the license exchange follow, in order, in Lisbon or Rome.
Another family came over with two children, a 14-year-old aiming at American universities and an 11-year-old who would probably finish her schooling in Europe. They arrived with what they took to be one question: Which school? Curriculum split the household before anyone had toured a campus.
Liberty drew a 20-year map instead of a shortlist. Curriculum, then town, then lease, then language tutoring, then the naturalization file, each with a date beside it, because most non-EU residents now wait a decade to apply and the revised Portuguese law adds a language and culture test.
A child who starts Portuguese at 11 meets that test as a bilingual adult. Across much of the EU, the passport at the end also changes what a student pays for university, and with two children that difference becomes a gift.
Families who do this well are rarely the ones who found the cleverest fund. They are the ones who knew, before the application went in, which country, which town, which school, and which month.
Liberty now maps all of that in advance, on both sides of the Atlantic. For anyone weighing two countries, two tax regimes, a curriculum, and a 10-year naturalization clock at the same time, the firm treats those as one decision rather than four. Those conversations begin at Liberty’s website.
Those conversations begin at www.libertylex.com and reach the firm at hello@libertylex.com
