Deloitte Legal has been registering impressive growth in the CEE region. CEE Legal Matters sat down with Andrei Burz-Pinzaru, Head of Deloitte Legal in Central Europe, to learn more about what fueled the development of Deloitte’s legal services function and what the firm’s plans are for the future.

Law firm spin-offs are a familiar phenomenon in CEE. To find out what challenges lawyers have to deal with when they leave established firms to start new ones in the current climate, CEE Legal Matters sat down with several partners who have done just that to get their perspectives on the process.

1999 was the year I started my career as an attorney, as a young graduate from the law school at Bucharest University, just accepted to the Bucharest Bar. Times then were so much different than today, and as 20 years have gone by, I look at what those years have meant for Romania and for me, and how much things have changed for the country I continue to live in and build my personal and professional life in.

Adina Calfa-Dudoiu is Legal Director at Rosia Montana Gold Corporation S.A., the gold mining project of Canada’s Gabriel Resources in Romania. Before joining RMCG in February 2017, she spent three years as Legal Director of UPC Romania, and another ten in private practice with CMS.

At the end of 2018 long-time Allen & Overy Partner Hugh Owen announced that, after 23 years at A&O — 19 of which were spent in CEE — he was stepping away from that Magic Circle firm to start his own consulting firm, called Go2Law. A year later, we checked in on him.

On October 29, 2018, leading Austrian law firms Dorda, Eisenberger & Herzog, Herbst Kinsky, PHH, Schoenherr, SCWP Schindhelm, and Wolf Theiss announced their joint launch of the “Legal Tech Hub Vienna”: a non-profit forum for LegalTech companies, start-ups, and other legal market participants to identify innovation potential and work together to implement technological tools appearing ever-more-rapidly on the legal market.

No individual, no business, and no country is immune from the threat of cybercrime. The increasingly successful and complex economies of CEE countries are no exception to this rule. In fact, for both historical and political reasons, CEE is at particular peril.

Upon reflection, 2018 feels like a year of reversal – the long economic expansion, fueled by quantitative easing by central banks, is losing steam, love for FAANGs and Big Tech turned into techlash, trade wars emerged and escalated, a negotiated divorce between the UK and the EU is descending into a disorderly no-deal Brexit, and so on. There is much to ponder in the short-term. Long-term challenges for the legal profession, however, lie elsewhere.