In The Corner Office, we invite Managing Partners at law firms from across the region to share information about their careers, management styles, and strategies. Our question this time: “What mistake do young associates commonly make that is most frustrating for you?”

The steady growth of the digital products market and an increasing demand for digital products required an adjustment to the Serbian VAT rules applicable to the supply of electronically supplied services (ESS), and that adjustment finally occurred in 2017. Combined with new rules on the VAT registrations of foreign suppliers, VAT obligations related to ESS became more straightforward.

On Thursday, November 30th, leading legal practitioners from across Central and Eastern Europe gathered in Prague to help CEE Legal Matters celebrate its fourth successful year as the leading chronicle of the legal industry in the region, participating in an expert Round Table conversation about the year just concluded and enjoying an evening of dinner, drinks, and bonhomie. 

The digital era brought us new ways of distribution of media content, one of them being the performance of services of online media platforms. Since this is a relatively new kind of business activity, it is necessary to analyze the way it fits within the provisions of Serbian legal system. The major question in this respect pertains to potential copyright and related rights infringement.

Leasing of employees – a situation in which employment agencies hire employees and act as their formal employers and then lease them to perform actual work for their client companies – has become a frequent phenomenon in Serbia the past few years. 

Intellectual property infringement through the circulation and sale of counterfeit goods is still very much both a global and a local issue. As modern day counterfeiting is now acquiring more sophisticated forms involving a plethora of new and usually unsuspected goods (for example, pharmaceuticals) and with the intent of not only existing on the black markets but infiltrating into the legal market flows as well, we are faced with the need for a more aggressive approach requiring first and foremost improved legislation and subsequently more efficient enforcement activities. 

The 2017 CEE Legal Matters General Summit took place at the Intercontinental Hotel in Warsaw on June 1-2, 2017, once again bringing together well over a hundred General Counsel and Heads of Legal from across Central and Eastern Europe for two full days (and one entertaining evening) of seminars, panel discussions, best practices review, and networking. This year’s event — the third annual, following the 2015 GC Summit in Budapest and the 2016 GC Summit in Istanbul — was the biggest and most successful yet.

On May 31 and June 1, 2017, CEE Legal Matters was proud to host a rare event: A gathering of those senior lawyers from each Central and Eastern European country identified by peers as being most influential, most important, most uniquely responsible for having created the country’s modern commercial legal market.

An issue that has been increasingly raised in international arbitration is whether third parties can be included in arbitration without their explicit consent.