On January 18, 2021, CEE Legal Matters reported that Cobalt had advised Practica Capital on its investment in Lithuanian start-up Biomatter Designs – part of the latter's EUR 500,000 investment round. CEEIHM spoke with Donatas Keras, Co-Founding Partner at Practica Capital to learn more about the matter.

On March 26, 2021, CEE Legal Matters reported that Motieka & Audzevicius, working with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, had advised Lithuanian start-up Turing College on its relocation to the United States in order to participate in Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator. CEE In-House Matters spoke with Benas Sidlauskas, Co-founder & CBDO at Turing College, to learn more about the matter.

On the 5th of October, the new regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on European crowdfunding service providers for business was approved. Although crowdfunding activities are already regulated in Lithuania by national laws, this new regulation represents a real opportunity for Lithuania and Lithuanian crowdfunding service providers.

In 2015, the word Cobalt took on a new meaning in the legal markets of Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, when a new pan-Baltic law firm with that name opened its doors, immediately entrenched in the top tier of the region’s legal markets. That firm owes much of its success and reputation to the Managing Partner of its Lithuanian office and Chairman of the firm-wide Management Board, Irmantas Norkus.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and various related restrictive measures have created an extraordinary human, business, and legal situation in Lithuania. The Energy sector (like all others) has become subject to various restrictions and challenges, including restrictions on the movement of workers, partner liquidity issues, reduced demand for energy resources, etc. As everywhere else in Europe, Lithuanian electricity market participants have faced a significant decrease in wholesale electricity market prices. Moreover, it is already clear that COVID-19 has negatively affected the international supply chain, as the energy market participants experience disruptions and delays in the performance of contracts and project delivery. In these extraordinary circumstances, industry players (including operating power plant operators, project developers, and so on) have a reasonable expectation that the government will take the effect of the ongoing international crisis into account if developers do not bid in time in auctions or miss their project deployment deadlines.

The Lithuanian life sciences industry has skyrocketed over the last two decades – the average annual growth within the biotechnology and pharmaceutical research and production sector reached over 19%, with 90% of its output exported. in 2017 Lithuania reached 16th place in the Scientific American Worldview biotechnology rankings. Lithuania dominates many (much) larger Central and Eastern European countries and boasts the fastest growing life science industry in Europe.

Over many years, the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian legal markets have been dominated by the same four firms, although the names they operate under have sometimes changed. At the very end of 2018, however, the market in Lithuania, the largest of the Baltic states, shook. when a large team split off from one of those four firms, and several months later merged with a leading independent firm in the country.

On December 12, 2019, CEE Legal Matters reported that Dentons, Magnusson, and TGS Baltic had advised the Avia Solutions group – a Lithuanian aviation services group – on a five-year bond issuance with a total value of USD 300 million, an annual interest rate of 7.875%, and a maturity date of 2024. The bonds were issued in US dollars and distributed in the US and European markets. White & Case and Sorainen helped JP Morgan and BNP Paribas organize the issuance.

Theis Klauberg took a circuitous route to managing his eponymous firm in the Baltics. He began his education in Germany, at the University of Hamburg, Heidelberg University, and Humboldt University of Berlin, before obtaining an LL.M. at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, then concluding his formal education with an MBA at the Baltic Management Institute. His professional career has been no less diverse, as he has worked in Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, and Zimbabwe.

In recent years, the government and courts of Lithuania have intensified their attempts to develop mediation. There are many reasons for this – promoting social peace, decreasing court caseloads, saving time and money for the end-users, and providing them with higher satisfaction among them.

Contributed by Walles.

Contributed by Cobalt

We will start the overview of the transport and logistics sector in Lithuania by showing the key figures of carriage of goods performed by Lithuanian carriers. The amount of goods carried by all means of transport in Q1 and Q2 of 2019 was 35,025 billion tonne-kilometres – over 16% more than over the same period in 2018, when the amount was 30,175 billion tonne-kilometres.

Amazingly, the Lithuanian FinTech ecosystem report of 2018 revealed that there were 170 FinTech companies based in Lithuania – reflecting 45 percent growth over the previous year – with some 2,600 employees working in FinTech companies, more than 700 of which were newly-employed in 2018. The numbers are still growing this year.

Although the General Data Protection Regulation 216/679 (the GDPR) has been in force for more than a year, the concept of data protection by design (Art. 25) is still largely underestimated and insufficiently implemented into software products and their development processes in Lithuania. Developers of data-rich technologies still disregard or misinterpret this duty despite its business benefits. This is especially true for new technological products which strive for steady and continuous increase in user numbers but lose their grip with user privacy on the way.

In 2019, the Lithuanian tax system will see significant changes, designed to reform personal taxation laws and tackle the shadow economy. These amendments have already been approved by the Lithuanian Parliament and will become effective at the start of the year.

In recent years, blockchain technology has offered the business world a variety of new and innovative ways to improve and grow. Starting with initial coin offerings, blockchain technology has found its way into the financial services industry and many other fields of business in Lithuania. The trend of “asset tokenization” has recently become popular among companies seeking to adopt innovative modern technologies and create novel ways to apply blockchain technology when doing business. However, as convenient and simple as it may seem, asset tokenization is an extremely complicated business model, challenging not only the traditional approaches to the sale and purchase of assets, but also raising questions about the relevance of applicable laws and regulations currently in effect.

Issues relating to the lease of state-owned land in Lithuania are regulated by the country’s Law on Land.