I think there is an overall tendency to believe that things were easier or simpler for previous generations. This conviction often prevails even if the older generation went through large cataclysms (like world wars, lost revolutions, widespread civil riots, etc.).
I personally tend to think that each generation has its own problems. Sometimes these problems, especially glancing at them retrospectively, might seem bigger, more interesting, or more unique than some of those in other eras, or your own.
I do not know how in a couple of decades the years of 2000 up to today will be viewed. But I strongly believe that we have been living in an age when we lawyers, regardless whether working in-house or in a law firm, have huge and at least partly unseen challenges ahead of us, practically day to day.
I believe this is partly true due to advances in information technology, which have been amazing in the last two decades. I remember the dawn of my career in the mid-90s when I had a PC and a cell phone (at that time it was called a radio-phone and resembled a small piece of hand-luggage), which today would look simply odd and ridiculous. In those years I could not foresee how technical “gadgets” like the tablets, iPads, and smartphones would completely change and turn the world upside down. Of course these gadgets are inseparable from the Internet, and all those applications and IT solutions that use the Internet as a technical basis.
But here we are, and now we have to find out how the distant availability of your company’s server influences the restrictions on working hours, whether to have a private smartphone with you or a tablet at home, if using the smartphone or tablet (with at least the implied consent of the employer) for company purposes can result in becoming a subject of employer and/or official authority scrutiny, and how private rights to personal data are affected by the usage of community networks. Can an employer lawfully request that an employee refrain from joining a social website? Or, alternatively, is it lawful for employers to buy a candidate’s profile (for internal review purposes, for instance, or for hiring/recruiting purposes) put together from data and information available on social network accounts? The protection of company property embodied in data requires also a completely different legal (and of course technical) approach. I am afraid that regulations in these subjects (if any) still lack proper and final legal solutions.
And what shall we, lawyers, do with the increasing political uncertainty on our globe? What used to be relatively rare sanctions have become regular and more widespread, causing enormous economic losses to concerned business entities. Corporates are forced to leave their significant investment in long-term projects in countries with a very good chance that they will never be returned to them and losses will not be recouped. Bank accounts are frozen for long years. Of course, a civilized nation or a civilized company may hardly refute the overall legitimacy of most of the sanctions. Nevertheless the question remains: Is it acceptable that only those bear the losses who, to their bad luck (or put it differently: who undertook higher risks with a country entry), happened to be physically present or doing business in certain countries? Or should there be an international solution, such as a fund that compensates (at least partially) all such provable losses?
Prior to the global economic crisis that began in 2008, Western and Western-type states held a different view of their roles in national and supranational economies. Among the many long-running effects of the (in my opinion still ongoing) crisis, many states, including the most developed, have felt an increasing need to intervene and interfere with even the very basics of economic foundations. Depending on your political beliefs or convictions, this kind of state intervention (or rather the re-definition of the role of a state) might be viewed as positive and advantageous for society as a whole. In my experience, though, this “new” philosophy usually brings about either overregulation, resulting in towering self-contradictions in implementing and interpreting laws, or, in not a few cases, the direct intervention of a state (e.g. by levying special taxes, requiring extra contributions from both multinational and larger local players, etc.) has forced affected companies to redefine their business strategies – keeping in mind, however, such state intervention is not necessarily contingent on economic crises and might occur practically any day.
No doubt, General Counsels and Managing Partners of law firms face a consistent set of challenges that have been in place for many years now: How your team can and must support the business in the most effective way, constantly keeping in mind headcount, cost-savings, value addition, and similar standard issues we are all expected to manage. Now, though, the overall unpredictability caused by rapid and unstoppable technological development, combined with the political uncertainties and the long-lasting economic crisis, along with the evaporation of old dogmas (which gave a kind of support and served as a lighting tower) has also become an inalienable part of our professional life. My guess is it will remain with us for a good while. This makes me especially excited to imagine how we will be viewed in retrospect. Will our future lawyer colleagues view us as a successful generation of legal professionals who faced unique, interesting, and occasionally unseen opportunities and challenges and finally were up to all these, or ... will we be just one of those average generations of an average era? The answer remains to be seen but, as usual, a lot depends upon us. My sleeves are rolled up.
By Pal Kara, Group General Counsel, MOL Group
This Article was originally published in Issue 6 of the CEE Legal Matters Magazine. If you would like to receive a hard copy of the magazine, you can subscribe here.
