Hungarian lawyer Peter Paroczi is the Director Counsel at Harman International, the US-based consumer electronics company. He joined Harman in Budapest earlier this year, after spending four years in private practice and then another seven in-house, first with Samsung Electronics, then at E.On. He agreed to answer some of our questions about his career.

Pro bono is a Latin phrase meaning “for the public good,” and, in the lawyering context, it refers to legal services provided free of charge, generally to indigent clients or charities or other public interest institutions unable to afford standard legal fees. The practice, which in its current form was developed first in Western legal markets, has seen a significant increase in recent years in CEE as well. Hungary is among the countries leading the way.

In The Corner Office we invite Managing Partners at law firms across the region to share information about their unique roles. The question this time around: What is your favorite question when interviewing a job applicant, and why?

Each year hundreds of billions of dollars are lost by companies due to cybercrimes committed by criminals. These attacks vary from sophisticated hacking to primitive fraud attempts. 

On Thursday, November 30th, leading legal practitioners from across Central and Eastern Europe gathered in Prague to help CEE Legal Matters celebrate its fourth successful year as the leading chronicle of the legal industry in the region, participating in an expert Round Table conversation about the year just concluded and enjoying an evening of dinner, drinks, and bonhomie. 

The Hungarian Parliament has recently adopted three new procedural laws: Act CXXX of 2016 on the Code of Civil Procedure (“CCP”), Act I of 2017 on the Code of Administrative Litigation (“CAL”), and Act CL of 2016 on Administrative Proceedings, which will all enter into effect on January 1, 2018. These new procedural laws come on the heels of the recodification of many substantive laws such as the Civil Code and the Criminal Code. This article aims to give a brief overview of these new procedural laws.

The 2017 Hungary GC Summit is underway at the Boscolo Budapest Hotel in the Hungarian capital.

As the CEE Legal Matters team prepares for the upcoming Hungary General Counsel Summit, we sat down with Daniel Gera of Schoenherr to learn about the panel discussion he will be leading titled "Preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation - Challenge or Opportunity." 

Building upon the successes of the three past regional GC Summits in Budapest, Istanbul, and Warsaw, CEE Legal Matters is excited to be hosting the Hungary GC Summit – our first ever country-specific GC event. We sat down with the Chairman of the conference, Miklos Orban, Partner at Orban & Perlaki, to get his thoughts about the upcoming event. More information about the event itself can be found on the event website, here. 

In The Corner Office, we invite Senior and Managing Partners at law firms from across the region to share information about their careers, management styles, and strategies. For this issue, we asked them to describe their least favorite part of their jobs. 

Last year the Hungarian Ministry of Justice prepared a new Attorney Act that would radically re-structure the current regulatory approach to in-house counsel. GCs of leading companies in Hungary were given the opportunity to share their views in the process, giving them a rare occasion to pause and collectively consider the nature of this branch of the legal profession which in its few decades of existence has grown so much in significance.

A number of changes to the Labor Code expected to come into force on July 1, 2017, will not do so. These amendments to the Code – which were submitted to the President of the Parliament by the head of the Economic Committee – would primarily have affected work-time scheduling provisions, making the Labor Code more sensitive to the needs of the improving economy and changing labor market. According to Parliament, the amendments would have significantly improved production for businesses over a period of six to seven years. 

With slightly over a month to go until the first Hungary General Counsel Summit — the first ever country-specific GC Summit organized by CEE Legal Matters — on August 29, 2017, three members of the “Building the Legal Function as Integral Business Unit” panel scheduled for the event gathered at the offices of Budapest's OPL Law Firm to plan and prepare for their discussion.

Kinstellar Budapest moderated a panel discussion as part of the Startup Safary Budapest 2017 startup exhibition, which included sharing insight on the start-up ecosystem and expectations for 2017 in Hungary. 

We are excited to announce that registration for the 2017 CEE Legal Matters Hungary General Counsel Summit, scheduled to take place in Budapest at the Boscolo Hotel on October 5, is now open. 

The 2017 CEE Legal Matters General Summit took place at the Intercontinental Hotel in Warsaw on June 1-2, 2017, once again bringing together well over a hundred General Counsel and Heads of Legal from across Central and Eastern Europe for two full days (and one entertaining evening) of seminars, panel discussions, best practices review, and networking. This year’s event — the third annual, following the 2015 GC Summit in Budapest and the 2016 GC Summit in Istanbul — was the biggest and most successful yet.

On May 31 and June 1, 2017, CEE Legal Matters was proud to host a rare event: A gathering of those senior lawyers from each Central and Eastern European country identified by peers as being most influential, most important, most uniquely responsible for having created the country’s modern commercial legal market.

A significant anniversary inevitably causes us to reflect upon the period gone by. The sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US started in 2007 and, after spreading to other countries, became the global financial crisis that caused the longest-lasting recession of the post-war era. This recession, in conjunction with other factors, triggered sweeping changes in the Hungarian legal market. In retrospect, clear, recognizable patterns have emerged in the ten years since then.