The editors of CEE Legal Matters have very kindly asked me to contribute this month’s guest editorial and I am afraid in return I am going to pose a very impertinent question. The question I wish to ask is: is there any such thing as “CEE Legal Matters”?
The underlying question I have in mind of course is whether CEE still exists as a region, particularly in the legal sphere. Are we all still guilty of drawing on what is essentially a Cold War construct, give or take (as is inevitable in this part of the world) a few shifting boundaries? My own fascination with CEE derives in large part from my first term at university being punctuated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and many other wondrous moments as revolutions of various hues spread – am I now a bit too much in thrall to history? Are many of us still defending the existence of CEE because we cherish all of it too much to see it divided or its scope narrowed?
It won’t surprise you to learn that ultimately I think CEE still makes sense as a distinct space in which we are privileged to operate as legal practitioners. There are, I think, a number of aspects to this. First of all, although CEE economies are at various stages of development such that many have shed the “emerging market” tag long ago, the sense remains that nearly every transaction from a legal perspective is novel and requires innovative solutions. We are challenged by clients who often take us back to very first principles as to why an agreement or a sales process should be structured in the way that it is. They are not impressed by the argument “because this is simply how things are done.” How could they be? When you have lived through the history that this region has seen, you know that this argument is not to be taken seriously.
Terms like “landmark” and “groundbreaking” get thrown around too easily. We should not fall into the lazy expat trap of disparaging our colleagues who stayed behind in London or New York – they too spend much of their days on creative thinking and we should resist imagining they are all armies of drones laboring away in open-plan offices churning out the same commoditized documents week after week. I must admit however to feeling a twinge of sympathy when I received a mail from a lawyer recently whose signature gave his job title as “NDA Attorney”…
A second way in which I think the work of lawyers in CEE is still something distinctive is the sense – and this is a craven attempt to get back into this publication’s editors’ good books – that law matters. In London it is all too easy to view work in big City law firms as just another arm of the financial services industry. I actually started my career as a corporate tax lawyer in London, and I can’t pretend to regard that time as one when I was making much of a contribution to humanity. I still think things are different in CEE. We may not always identify completely with our clients’ goals and we may not always admit to this, but I think most of us share the sense that the development of the rule of law and the putting of commercial relationships on a better regulated footing is a valuable goal in itself, and one which our work allows us to make a modest contribution to. And actually there is nothing at all modest about the contribution in this regard which many of our colleagues make: I think of the way in which the Polish legal profession has pulled together in the last year to defend the independence of the judiciary, the huge time sacrificed by Ukrainian lawyers to develop their country’s public administration, and the personal courage shown by numerous lawyers across the former Soviet space in fighting challenges to the rule of law where they encounter them.
And the third thing which I think unites us as practitioners across the region? A sense of fun and a sense that we are remarkably privileged to be in this profession, at this time, in this place. CEE often leads the way when it comes to the adoption of new tech but the video conference has still not supplanted the personal touch. Thank goodness! Many of us travel a lot. We may well fish for sympathy from colleagues with stories of our grueling travel schedules, missed flight connections, suicidal taxi drivers, and so on. But I think that anyone who has got to the end of this piece will be, like me, a CEE addict and will share my view that – whether in big letters or small – long may CEE (L)legal (M)matters continue!
By Sebastian Lawson, Partner, Freshfields Austria
This Article was originally published in Issue 5.2 of the CEE Legal Matters Magazine. If you would like to receive a hard copy of the magazine, you can subscribe here.
