The protection of whistle-blowers concerns persons who report the abuse of rights, illegal activity, corruption or other damage to public interests, which they found out about in the course of their work.

The most substantial changes to the BCA (effective as of 1.01.2021) will be:

The Supreme Court confirmed in a recent decision that the court can appoint an insolvency trustee as a liquidator of a legal entity that is being dissolved even without his consent. Under what conditions can the court do so and which insolvency trustee can it appoint?

On the 30th of July 2020, or more precisely the 1st of January 2021, a long-awaited amendment to the Labor Code will come into force. Its aim is among others to facilitate the enforcement of employees’ rights, to facilitate communication between the employer and employee, to increase the flexibility of working processes or, for instance, to reduce the administrative burden of some obligations placed on the employer. The Labor Code amendment reflects a wide range of practical problems and regulates a wide range of important institutions. In this short summary, we will discuss the most significant changes that will be brought about by the amendment.

“The Czech Republic is currently among the worst-hit countries when it comes to Covid,” says Rowan Legal Partner Michal Nulicek. “We have more than ten thousand new cases every day – which is a lot, considering that the entire country has about ten million people living in it.”

The European Commission has presented a proposal for two regulations that aim to harmonize the rules of the digital space in the European Union. The first regulation called the Digital Services Act focuses on the regulation of digital services of all kinds, and primarily protects the recipient of the services from illegal content, infringement of their consumer rights, and other risks.

The High Court of Olomouc in its decision 5 Cmo 15/2020 among other things commented on when a member of the statutory body should be held liable for their obligations to a business corporation upon a business corporation’s bankruptcy within the meaning of Section 68 of Act N. 90/2012 Coll., to regulate commercial companies and cooperatives (Business Corporations Act, hereinafter referred to as “BCA”), which regulates “punitive liability”, the aim of which is to compensate the creditors of a business corporation for deterioration in the recoverability of claims which was caused by the corporation’s bankruptcy or by a member (or former member) not exercising their office with due care, because the member failed to take all necessary and reasonably foreseeable steps to prevent the bankruptcy (even though he or she knew that the business corporation was facing an imminent threat of bankruptcy, or should and could have known it).

Electronic surveillance is regulated by Article 158d of the Rules of Criminal Procedure (hereinafter the “RoCP”), in the marginal section called “Surveillance of Persons and Items”. However, the term “electronic surveillance” itself is foreign to the RoCP, and this area is not regulated in sufficient detail on a legal level. At the same time, electronic surveillance is being used increasingly in practice and undoubtedly represents a significant intrusion into the privacy of the persons under surveillance.

A New York court has recently ruled that the depiction of Humvee vehicles manufactured by AMG in Activision games is not an infringement of intellectual property and falls under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. This may signify a radical change in game studios' approach to content licensing.

The Office for Personal Data Protection has released an inspection plan for the year 2020, which announces that this year they aim at intensively focusing on cookie use and plan to start 8 inspections at once that are intended to check cookie use. Yet, cookies are also the subject of interest for some other inspection offices that have made numerous statements about the use of cookies. While in the rest of the EU, users’ consent is required before storing cookies (the opt-in principle), according to the current Czech legislation embedded in Act N. 127/2005 Coll., on Electronic Communications, cookies can be used until the user says something (opt-out principle).

Why is a whistleblowing system necessary and how can it help you save your good reputation, organization, investments, and even your freedom?

Interview with the Partners of the New NGL Symbio Alliance.

On January 1, 2021, Act No. 49/2020 Coll. – commonly known as the BankID Act – will enter into force. This new legislation has the potential to bring a significant change to the way Czechs operate on the Internet and to promote further digitalization in both the public and private sectors.

I have always been a fan of marketing and felt that there was something special about it, even back before I had any real practical experience with it. My career started at an international law firm – Hogan Lovells – where marketing was handled both centrally and locally. I became a fan of the field and learned to consider the brand as something potentially very valuable and helpful both in attracting new clients and employees and in retaining existing ones. It also showed me that marketing activities must be conducted systematically.

The District Court of Liberec as plaintiff called into question the constitutionality of Section 138 Par. 1 of the Criminal Code that determines the property damage threshold after which criminal liability arises. The Court concluded that the regulation contradicts Art. 40 Par. 6 of the Charter, which stipulates that the criminality of a fact must be determined and the punishment must be decided according to the law that is in force at the time when the crime was committed. More recent laws should be applied when it is beneficial to the offender.

A European Parliament press release from the 22^nd of June about agreement on the revised text of the directive on representative actions has raised hopes for the swift finalization of legislation on class actions (“representative actions” in European jargon) on an EU level. The directive, which is part of the new concept of consumer protection – the so-called New Deal for Consumers – was introduced more than two years ago, but due to the strong response to the first motion and the fact that bringing about European class actions is overall a tricky process, it is only this year that some significant progress has finally been made.

The NGL Symbio law firm alliance has announced its creation in five countries of CEE, and its plans to be fully operational by January 1, 2021.

The exchange of personal data between the European Union and the United States have suffered a further setback as the EU Court of Justice ruled against the Commission’s Privacy Shield Decision in the Schrems II case. The consequences could be far-reaching, and impact data flows not only to the United States. While the Court upheld the Commission’s decision regarding Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs), any data flow to a third country must respect the GDPR principles and protect the fundamental freedoms of European citizens. The Court made clear that any jurisdiction, into which personal data are transferred, must offer an essentially equivalent level of personal data protection assessed considering both contractual clauses agreed between transferring parties and the relevant aspects of third country’s legal system. Consequently, not only big companies, such as Facebook, Microsoft, or Google, but also small and medium-sized businesses, must evaluate all data transfers to non-EU countries and assess the potential risks for the data in question.