Freshfields boasts of its “international mobile lawyers” – but, in this part of the world, few are as international or mobile as Freshfields’ Partner Sebastian Lawson.
In 1987, 15-year-old Sebastian Lawson arrived in Prague as part of a school trip – his first venture behind the Iron Curtain – and discovered the “wonderful other world” the English teenager had previously known almost nothing about.
“Prague was a complete revelation,” Lawson recalls with a smile. “A wonderful medieval city. Nothing was as I imagined – I was completely captivated by the cultural and historical aspects and the beauty of the city, but also the classical and jazz music.”
Back at school, Lawson’s passion for Central and Eastern Europe was encouraged by his instructors, many of whom had personal ties to the region. One of his Russian teachers, he recalls, had escaped a collapsing Russian monarchy in the early decades of the 20th century. “He was around his seventies or eighties when he taught me,” Lawson says, “having come from a Russian aristocratic family, his family having fled Russia (with my teacher hid under a cabbage-leaf on a horse-drawn cart), and lost all their money – he really had a remarkable life.” With teachers encouraging his interest, Lawson was eager to learn more about Russia’s culture and literature, which he described as “seeming simultaneously exotic and yet quite familiar.”
In 1990, after the Berlin Wall had fallen, and with revolution in the Eastern European air, Lawson, then a first-year student at Oxford, responded to his university’s call for volunteers to teach English in Romania. He went to Bucharest that summer – and then again the next – and then returned in 1994 yet again to conduct research for his Master’s thesis on the politics of Romania and Moldova.
Ultimately, Lawson’s youthful affinity for the cultures, languages, and lands of Central and Eastern Europe set his path. Almost thirty years later he is now a widely-respected Partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, speaks English, French, German, Romanian, and Russian, has spent the better part of one decade lawyering in Romania and the better part of another in Russia, and he has worked on many of the largest deals in CEE and CIS. The student of CEE’s cultures and languages, who has recently relocated again to Vienna, is a familiar face across the region.
Lift-Off: A Different Plan
Surprisingly, looking back on a successful career with one of the best-known and highest-regarded law firm brands on the planet, Lawson admits that the law wasn’t his first choice. “When I was at school and university, I never considered law, to be honest,” he admits. “My hope was to stay at the university and do a Doctorate in East European politics and economics, but then I did a Masters and found academic life a bit restricting.” He decided to replace his original plans with, as he says, “something less limited, but equally intellectually challenging.”
Still, even within the law, there was little indication early on that Lawson’s career would take the path it did, as he started with Freshfields in the early years of the 21st century with a resolutely English (and non-transactional) practice. “I was just another City of London lawyer,” he laughs, pointing out that “being a corporate tax lawyer is one of the least international practices you can have as a lawyer.” Still, and resolutely cheerful, Lawson describes those early years as “interesting and enjoyable.”
A couple years later, Lawson came across an open call for lawyers to join a different Magic Circle firm in the Romanian city he had spent several summers in during his studies. “When I became a tax lawyer, I did not really expect to be working overseas,” he says. “Certainly, to see an advert from Linklaters seeking a lawyer to join the office in Romania was a huge surprise.”
Intrigued and encouraged, Lawson made some inquiries, received an offer, and spent 2003 and 2004 as part of Linklaters’ legendary Bucharest-based CEE “Flying Team.”
At the end of 2004, however, he agreed to return to Freshfields, to help build up the firm’s practice in South-Eastern Europe. Although the firm had no office in Bucharest Lawson stayed there, making weekly commutes to the firm’s nearest office in Budapest.
Stage Two: Settling in CEE
In the first decade of this century Romania was ramping up to join the EU (it eventually did so in 2007), and business was thriving. “There were numerous opportunities for privatizations, large investments in the banking and energy sectors, and growing interest of investors from the West,” Lawson recollects, while hastening to note that business was growing in Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavian markets he covered as well.
Nonetheless, competition was fierce, and Lawson faced the challenge of Freshfields having less of an on-the-ground CEE presence than many of the firms he was competing against. “We were not always well-known, and persuading people that even without having a local office we could add value to projects in the region was not always easy,” he says.
In 2009, after five years working outside the firm’s office network, Lawson returned to London, timing his return with his promotion to the firm’s partnership.
Stephen Revell, now a Senior Corporate Partner in Freshfields’ Asia practice, has known Lawson from the Oxford graduate’s earliest days in the firm’s London office, and who became a good friend of Lawson, says his candidacy was an easy call. “I was a very strong supporter of him becoming a partner at Freshfields. I think Seb is an extremely good lawyer who is always rigorous in his approach. He is always willing to really understand the local law and to get involved in the analysis with local lawyers – as a result he brings to bear his experience from not only the UK, but all of CEE and CIS.”
Once Again Into the Breach: Moving Back to CEE
After two years back in London, Lawson once again packed his suitcase and moved to Freshfields office in Moscow. He remembers adapting to life in the Russian capital as a wholly new experience. “I was overwhelmed,” Lawson says of his first months in Russia. “The scale of Moscow … the city is much greater than anything you find in Eastern Europe. The work that we do in Moscow is not fundamentally different, but the cultural shock you get when you arrive in Moscow has its impact.” As a result, he says, it took him several months to adjust to the new environment.
Lawson found Russian clients different from those he had been working with in the UK as well, though he insists “not in a negative way.” According to him, “they are intelligent, quick, and sophisticated, and they challenge you to think about the basic first principles on how you do a deal.” Whereas in London, he says, where the long history of practice means that basic advice is rarely questioned, “in Moscow you can expect clients not to accept the argument that ‘we do this because we have always done it like this.’ You always need to be much more thoughtful when you are dealing with Russian clients.”
Lawson eventually spent six years in Moscow, working with clients such as Rosneft, Russian Railways, and many private Russian companies, including a number in the steel industry and transport sector. As the head of Freshfields’ English-law corporate practice in Moscow, he also advised international investors on opportunities in Russia.
Even then, Lawson’s practice was not limited to Russia, and Revell, who moved to Hong Kong about the same time Lawson moved to Moscow, recalls many of the deals the two worked on in various emerging markets. “He and I have worked in many countries across the region: we worked on IPOs and M&As in Kazakhstan, IPOs in Serbia and Croatia, M&As in Bulgaria, a project in Lithuania … the list goes on.”
Vienna Calling: From the Land of the Tsars to the Land of the Hapsburgs
Several years later, however, Western sanctions imposed against Putin’s Russia in 2014 took a toll on incoming investment into the country, which the simultaneous drop in global oil prices exacerbated. As a result, the Russian legal market became more domestic in nature, and although Lawson says some deals are still done under English law, “now it is more common to have Russian clients on both sides of the table,” which reduces the need for expatriate involvement.
Thus, it was decided that having one of Freshfields’ key CEE/CIS experts based in Moscow made little sense in the current situation, and Lawson moved to Vienna in January 2018. Freshfields Partner Willibald Plesser, who co-heads Freshfields’ CEE/CIS group, had been instrumental in bringing Lawson back to the firm from Linklaters in 2004, and was so again in encouraging Lawson to join him in Vienna this year. He expresses enthusiasm about finally being able to work in the same office as his long-time friend and colleague, describing Lawson as a “great negotiator and an excellent jurist with a good analytical mind,” and reports that he has “the highest respect for him.”
And Lawson believes that joining Freshfields in Vienna – an office the firm has built up over the course of many years as the regional hub for CEE and CIS countries – fits his practice well. He says, “I don’t want to be limited to one particular market, instead of working throughout the region and following the deals. Having a base in the Vienna office is very important for me. The ability to be in the same office as my finance or arbitration colleagues is helpful and good for me and my clients.”
Lawson sees many similarities between the city he’s now based in and the one he recently left, describing both post-imperial cities as having a rich history, providing cultural facilities that few others in Europe can match. But he doesn’t deny the significant differences. “Business here has a clear strategy,” he says, “and though the Austrian market is small on its own, everybody is outward looking. Moscow is a much more inward looking place.” Indeed, while imperialistic glories of both countries are a thing of the past, he says, “Moscow hasn’t come in to terms with that yet, while Vienna is much more at ease, as it adjusted to its new circumstances a long time ago, and is much more comfortable in its own skin.” This comfort is noticeable in other ways as well, he says. “People in Austria have a very fine sense of work/life balance,” though he admits with a laugh that “I don’t think I have found it yet.”
In addition, Austria’s relative proximity to the UK matters as well, as it allows Lawson to stay more closely connected with his two young children back home. “When I was in Moscow, I travelled back to see them usually every other weekend – and now I travel back every weekend.” It’s not the ideal solution, perhaps, but he looks on the bright side. “I am very lucky with modern technology. It’s not completely easy, but I Skype with them every evening, and in terms of time that we spend in video conferencing, it is probably more than I would spend talking to them if I were burning the midnight oil in our London office.”
Conclusion
It is probably premature to predict Lawson will be in Vienna forever, but he insists he expects to stay. And he reflects with pride on the practice he’s created in this part of the world. “I think it is incredibly important to lawyers to understand the countries where they operate,” Lawson says. “The culture, the history, and the politics: without understanding all of these things intimately, you won’t be able to give the same quality advice to your clients. It is partly having that background knowledge, but it is also partly having the enthusiasm and the excitement to do the job. I find my job incredibly interesting, and I think I made the right career decision. Combining it with the countries I find so interesting makes it a dream career for me.”.
This Article was originally published in Issue 5.6 of the CEE Legal Matters Magazine. If you would like to receive a hard copy of the magazine, you can subscribe here.