The Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and subsequent military actions in Eastern Ukraine left Ukraine reeling. It took a while for the country to develop a strategy and institute its first arbitration and court actions against the Russian Federation. These first legal challenges are now bearing fruit, as several landmark decisions have recently been delivered by major international dispute resolution venues.

Rob Shantz is a partner and the Head of the Corporate practice of Redcliffe Partners. He is a US-qualified lawyer with over 28 years of experience, including some 20 years in Central and Eastern Europe. Shantz specializes in cross-border corporate law and corporate governance matters, as well as in FCPA compliance investigation.

In the modern world, people are regularly faced with new challenges.

In The Corner Office, we invite Senior and Managing Partners at law firms from across the region to share information about their careers, management styles, and strategies. For this issue, we asked them to describe their least favorite part of their jobs. 

Preserving confidentiality is always a top priority for a successful business, especially if you have an advanced R&D department. Taking into account the need to freely transfer information on the one hand and the strict necessity to preserve the safety of personal data and databases on the other, the issue of confidentiality becomes even more important.

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.

The Ukrainian court system saw significant changes in 2016. The first, and probably the most important, was the initiation of judicial reform, which included changes to the Constitution of Ukraine and a truly significant amount of new laws (some of which have already passed through the Parliament, with others still under development). In addition, in 2016, Ukrainian legal community witnessed some unexpected decisions of the Supreme Court of Ukraine affecting the jurisdiction of Ukrainian courts, which contributed to uncertainty in the Ukrainian judiciary.

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. For this issue, we asked them to describe the first major deal or client matter they generated themselves, and how they did it.