Throughout my career, the only predictable feature of the Russian market has been its unpredictability. Given what has happened in Russia in the first months of 2018, it would appear that foretelling the future is not about to get any easier.

Ever since the CEE market opened for private practice CEE lawyers have sought to work on international mandates in collaboration with international lead counsels. Apart from the obvious (we take an oath to serve justice, but it is no secret that we also in fact work for money), the benefits of this cooperation also include the opportunity to draw on the international counsel’s expertise, particularly in transactional work. Such cooperation has greatly influenced the work of local counsel. Those who seized the opportunity had a steep learning curve and developed their practices to a level that is generally referred to, mostly in lawyers’ own pitches, as reaching an “international standard.”

On March 9, 2018, CEE Legal Matters reported on the expansion of the European act legal alliance with the addition of Hungary’s Ban Karika law firm and Fort Advocaten from the Netherlands. With the alliance now counting 13 offices in Europe – including five in CEE – CEE Legal Matters sat down with Sven Tischendorf of act legal Germany, AC Tischendorf Rechtsanwälte to learn more about the alliance’s plans.

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?

Vera Kolesnik is Nestle’s Legal Director for Russia and Eurasia. Before joining Nestle in 2007 she worked for four years at Ernst & Young and for five years at the Institute of State and Law at the Russian Academy of Science.

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.

In the summer of 2018, CEE Legal Matters reported that Turkey’s Garanti Bank had issued its first-ever Gender Bonds. The bonds, valued at USD 75 million and issued in partnership with the Women Entrepreneurs Opportunity Facility launched by the IFC through its Banking on Women Program, and Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women initiative, are meant to finance small enterprises and companies owned or managed by women in Turkey.