Submissions are now being accepted for the 2022 CEE Deal of the Year Awards – the most prestigious peer-selected legal awards in Central and Eastern Europe.
Explanation and Methodology
Only deals that are formally submitted will be considered, and all submissions must be received by CEE Legal Matters on or before January 13, 2023.
As always, the editors and staff of CEE Legal Matters play no role in the evaluation of submissions or the selection of winners. Instead, submissions are exclusively evaluated by two panels of prominent lawyers from across the region – with members of the second and final panel forbidden from voting in markets where their firms are among the finalists.
Mandatory rules for submissions can be found below.
Those submissions which satisfy the mandatory criteria will be automatically forwarded to our Shortlist Panels, consisting of senior partners at leading firms and/or highly experienced and respected General Counsel in each CEE jurisdiction who have agreed to rank the submissions for complexity, size, and market significance. Their votes will be tabulated, and the resulting shortlists for each market in which a minimum of three deals were submitted will be announced on February 16, 2023.
The shortlisted submissions will then be forwarded to the Final Selection Committee, consisting of CEELM Knowledge Partners and select other legal experts from across the region, who will review and rank the finalists, leading to the final determination of the winner for each market.
2023 Deal of the Year Awards Banquet
The 2022 CEE Deals of the Year Award winners will be announced at the 2023 CEE Deals of the Year Awards Banquet, scheduled in conjunction with the 2023 CEE General Counsel Summit.
Previous Years’ Awards
The CEE Deals of the Year Awards, recognizing the largest and most important deals in Central and Eastern Europe, were launched in 2017, with winners of the first DOTYs announced at the June 6, 2018, Deal of the Year Awards Banquet in Prague, and winners of the 2018 DOTYs announced at the March 28, 2019 Banquet in Budapest. The Covid-19 crisis forced the cancellation of two Deal of the Year Banquets, so winners of the 2019 awards were announced in the May, 2020 issue of the CEE Legal Matters magazine (here), and the 2020 awards were announced in the August, 2022 issue (here). The 2021 awards were announced at the 2022 Deal of the Year Awards Banquet in London – full details of that event is here and a full list of all past winning deals is here.
Submitting Deals:
Submissions must be made using this online form on or before January 13, 2023. Please Note: Submissions received after that date, or not submitted using the online form will not be considered.
Important Updates from previous DOTYs:
- Starting this year, we're introducing a rolling system of CEE Deal of the Year submissions to help firms avoid the stress of end-of-the-year deadlines. The cap of three submissions per firm per jurisdiction remains, so we will reach out at the end of the year to any firms that have submitted more than that and ask them to pick which three of the submitted deals they'd like to put forward.
- As opposed to previous years, the eligibility of deals will be determined based on the date of closing, not of signing. Only deals that were closed between January 1 and December 31, 2022, will be considered, without exception. Because of this change, some deals that were submitted for previous editions of the DOTYs might be eligible this year because of their closing, rather than signing date but deals that won a previous edition of the DOTYs are NOT eligible again for the jurisdiction(s) for which it was awarded the DOTY in the past. The full list of past winning deals is here.
