45 days. That’s how long it took Roman Kramarik, Partner at JSK in the Czech Republic who recently became the first-ever Czechoslovakian pilot to fly around the world, to complete his 36,863-kilometer mission. After crossing three oceans, surviving monsoon rains, facing the cold of Alaska and the warmth of the Far East, all behind the controls of his Cessna P210N Centurion airplane named the “Winged Lion,” Kramarik returned to his office at the Prague law firm, rightly proud – and more than a little exhausted.

In its most recent annual report, the Czech Competition Authority stated that the investigation of bid-rigging cartels would be its highest priority. The issue of bid rigging is a hot topic that has attracted the attention not only of the CCA, but also that of the Czech police and public prosecutors, who have been very active in investigating bid-rigging cartels in recent years.

The legal regulation of transactions with virtual currencies and Initial Coin Offerings / Initial Token Offerings is a topic of ever more frequent discussion in the Czech Republic. The ano-nymity of cryptocurrency transactions has been reduced by the introduction of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules, while the Czech regulator’s approach to the regulation of trading with virtual currencies is very liberal.

In The Corner Office we ask Managing Partners across Central and Eastern Europe about their unique roles and responsibilities. The question this time around: Who was your mentor, and what was the most important lesson you learned from him or her?

Ondrej Plesmid is the Chief Legal Officer at King’s Casino in the Czech Republic. His career as a lawyer started in a small law office, and he subsequently worked for over three years in the Czech Ministry of Finance and then the Ministry of Regional Development. In 2017 he moved to the private sector and started to work at King’s Casino.

The Deal: On April 25, 2018, CEE Legal Matters reported that Clifford Chance had advised Czech Media Invest on its acquisition of Lagardere’s sale of its radio businesses in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania. Herbert Smith Freehills and Wolf Theiss advised Lagardere on the deal.

Internet traders, who have not yet managed to recover fully from the effects of the GPDR on their activities, are already facing another regulation likely to have a significant impact on technical solutions used in the operation of Internet businesses. In March 2018, Regulation (EU) 2018/302 (the “Regulation”) was adopted, the purpose of which is to solve so-called “unjustified geo-blocking” by removing certain obstacles to the operation of the internal market and by preventing discrimination based on nationality, place of residence, or place of establishment in cross-border online transactions.

When acquiring a company owning real estate or an independent property, a check of the seller’s title to the real estate is an integral part of the due diligence process. The scope of the due diligence that is necessary is about to be narrowed.

Start-Ups represent a unique subset of clients for major law firms, as they are often unable to pay the fees those firms generally require, but – particularly in the tech sector – hold out the potential of significant profitability down the road. Intrigued by the unique challenges and opportunities for law firms offering their services to these cash-poor but potential-high clients, we invited partners from four prominent law firms in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to share their strategies and experiences with Start-ups with us in the offices of Kocian Solc Balastik in Prague. KSB Partner Christian Blatchford moderated the conversation. 

I started my legal career back in 1993 as a student clerk, and over the past 25 years I have literally grown up with the firm. I’ve had the pleasure of advising clients during some of the most exciting periods in Czech history – from the “Wild Wild East” of the nineties, to EU accession, through the global financial crisis and recovery.

It has been more than four years since new legislation revolutionizing Czech private law came into effect, mainly through the adoption of a new Civil Code. Among the most affected industries was real estate, traditionally a very strong investment sector on the Czech market. How has life been since this revolution?

On May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation finally came into effect, imposing new requirements on organizations within the European Union and on those outside the EU that offer goods or services to EU data subjects or monitor their behavior. To learn more about the state of readiness in one such country, we spoke to Schoenherr attorney and Data Protection specialist Eva Bajakova in Prague.

The GDPR comes into effect on May 25, 2018. Since data processing concerns a wide range of activities, very few companies or entrepreneurs will be unaffected. Numerous articles and discussions have been posted about the GDPR in the media, some of which contain false or misleading information and therefore give rise to concern, especially considering the possibility of high penalties. Failure to adopt national implementing legislation does not help the situation either. In this article we would like to highlight some of this misleading information and explain the inaccuracies.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation is, according to the EU-hosted GDPR website, “the most important change in data privacy regulation in the past 20 years.” The Act, which was approved by the EU Parliament on April 14, 2016 and will become fully effective on May 25, 2018, was designed “to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens’ data privacy, and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy.”

It’s been quite a wait, but the D4 Motorway PPP project should be coming to market in April. The project will involve the design, construction, financing, operation and maintenance of a 36 km stretch of motorway between Pribram and Pisek in the south west of the Czech Republic, with operation and maintenance of an adjacent 16 km of existing motorway.

The winners of the 2017 CEE Deal of the Year Awards were announced at the first ever CEE Legal Matters Deal of the Year Awards Banquet last night in Prague. The biggest smiles in the joyous and music-filled celebration of CEE lawyering, perhaps, were on the faces of Partners from Avellum and Sayenko Kharenko, which, along with White & Case and Latham & Watkins, won the award both for Ukrainian Deal of the Year and CEE Deal of the Year for their work on the 2017 Ukraine Eurobond Issue (a story initially reported by CEE Legal Matters on October 2, 2017).

In The Corner Office we ask Managing Partners at law firms across the region important questions about their unique roles and responsibilities. The question this time around: What was your favorite course in law school, and why?

Supporting the generation of electricity and heat from renewable energy sources has a long-standing tradition in the Czech Republic.