Law firm Clifford Chance 'in shock' after lawyer missing in yacht disaster

By Sara Merken

(Reuters) - A prominent New York lawyer who is among six missing passengers of a sunken yacht off Italy's coast was traveling with his longtime client, British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, just weeks after helping him avoid conviction in a 12-year legal saga.

Divers were still searching on Tuesday for the defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor Christopher Morvillo, a partner at law firm Clifford Chance, and his wife Neda, along with Lynch and three other missing passengers. There are 15 known survivors.

The British-flagged Bayesian, a luxury 56-metre-long (184-ft) superyacht, was carrying 22 people and anchored off the Sicilian port of Porticello when it was hit by a fierce, pre-dawn storm on Monday and sank.

Ayla Ronald, a London-based senior associate at Clifford Chance, and her partner were among the survivors, the London-founded global law firm said in a statement on Tuesday. Ronald has also represented Lynch, according to her profile on the firm's website.

"We are in shock and deeply saddened by this tragic incident," a Clifford Chance spokesperson said.

Morvillo, 59, was a lead lawyer for Lynch and won his acquittal in June after a three-month-long San Francisco fraud trial stemming from Hewlett-Packard's ill-fated acquisition of Lynch's software company Autonomy, and has represented the UK entrepreneur since 2012.

He is the son of Robert Morvillo, considered one of New York's savviest criminal-defense attorneys before his death in 2011. The younger Morvillo is also a leading white-collar defender and a former assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan who assisted in the criminal investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Lynch sold Autonomy to HP for $11 billion in 2011, but the deal spectacularly unraveled with the U.S. tech giant accusing him of fraud.

Morvillo put Lynch on the stand to question his client at the U.S. criminal trial this summer, a bold move that paid off when the jury acquitted him. Lynch testified that he was not involved in the transactions that prosecutors said amounted to a massive accounting fraud at Autonomy.

In a podcast interview with white-collar criminal defense lawyer David Oscar Markus posted last week, Morvillo said he first joined Lynch's legal team in November 2012, soon after HP wrote down Autonomy's value by $8.8 billion.

"It's covered one third of my career," Morvillo said of his work for Lynch.

(Reporting by Sara Merken; Editing by David Bario and Sandra Maler)