What do you see as the main points that differentiate Concern Dialog Law Firm from your competitors?

• Professional, qualified and constantly self-developing team֊ we believe that our main asset is our team and we approach this issue in a systemic and institutional matter.

Firstly, we conduct the process of hiring via several steps – CV revision, and rigorous shortlisting, several rounds of interview by the committee composed of partners by a unanimous decision, and intensive onboarding training and three-month probation. This procedure is applied to hiring lawyers of all levels. The above mentioned way of recruitment looks standard to many of our foreign colleagues, but it is yet to become a standard in Armenia.

Secondly, we believe that hiring talent is only the first step. We conduct constant additional training of the team, in addition to compulsory pieces of training conducted by the Chamber of advocates. Day-to-day professional training enables our specialists to be competitive in the current legal environment. Qualified specialists are associated with appropriate support and encouragement to undertake relevant continuing vocational education and to develop their personal and professional skills. Practical weekly discussions on service quality issues and ethics is another dimension of ensuring a high-level of service by the firm.

Thirdly, we intensively cooperate with educational institutions (universities and the school of advocates), to help assist the younger generation with legal work and become well prepared lawyers, and we use this as a source to identify talent early on. Collaboration with the organisation of law clinics, support of the moot courts, lecturing and giving of ad hoc trainings in the universities provide opportunity to students to practice skills like interviewing, contract drafting, legal research, legal analysis, transaction planning and management, application of substantive law to client-specific problems, client counselling, client communication and business writing, and oral and visual presentation skills.

• Concern Dialog is one of the first law firms (if not the first) in Armenia who has a real partner path for the employees. The associate’s productivity level, teamwork, continuous and constant development allows them to move up the career ladder and consequently become partners. 3 out of 4 existing partners have started their career in the firm as associates. The process is continuous, and is a real incentive for the younger lawyers to pursue the highest standard within the firm, while ensuring client satisfaction and firm growth (Concern Dialog is the most prominent firm in Armenia now – has grown from a small boutique firm with one partner in 2003-2007 to now 60 lawyers, and the growth is continuing, including exploring new areas of practice and industries, as well as developing more in-depth knowledge in existing areas of practice).

• Implementation of new technological and managerial solutions, constant improvement of the efficiency, while keeping up with the highest quality and information security standards. The firm is always keen to implement and use emerging technologies accessible to the budget and size. More details are provided below in question 4, but in general, in my opinion, we can be considered the most technologically advanced firm in Armenia (if not in the region).

We were one of the first entities in Armenia to use Dropbox back in 2009 when the latter was still in the initial phase and moved to more complicated solutions in parallel to the development and growth of the firm. We tried and used numerous time tracking, case-management, task and project management solutions, aimed at improving collaboration within the firm, and raising the efficiency of the work, while still always paying particular attention to security and confidentiality (even within the firm). Also, from the beginning (at least since the early 2000’s when I purchased the firm and became the managing partner) we paid special attention not to use any non-licensed (counterfeit) software, a thing which was very strange those days. After the SaaS solutions became more widely used, we moved to G Suite and Office 365 suites to be able to always have the most recent version of the software with all the security patches and capabilities.

Now, we are in the process of the full implementation of Blackberry Workspaces and other related BB solutions for secure collaboration and communication, and will be implementing comprehensive endpoint device management solutions, which is not very common in Armenia as well (many attorneys still use a general email address, or use a simple mail client from a shared hosting). In parallel, we are developing our software pieces to make different pieces/solutions work together, including specialised time tracking solution (toggl), note-taking app (Google Keep, Evernote or others), email (Gsuite), documents (google docs and Microsoft office), billing solutions, accounting solutions and some others.

In addition to general IT solutions in specific areas, we are investing heavily in the development of necessary software. For example, since 2010 (when we decided to enter into debt collection and NPL management services market), we developed and continuously improved our custom-made software, enabling us to scale the services practically limitless, while not losing control over the process. We work with state-owned e-gov solutions (e.g. electronic register of legal entities) to enable applications and document exchange with the system in a simplified (automated) manner, and now exploring possibilities to connect to e-justice system and have information and document exchange with the courts.

We are not yet able to invest enough in AI, machine learning and distributed ledgers (blockchain), and we are also continually exploring the possibility of implementing these and new technologies with start-ups and established IT firms within different platforms where we are active.

I believe the IT solutions implemented in the firm allows us to be more competitive and be able to provide faster, more cost-efficient and higher quality services.

• In comparison with many other firms, given the size, IT solutions and deeper specialisation, we have formed very strong and professional litigation, dispute resolution, bankruptcy and criminal law practice teams. Many firms in the market (at least ones working with foreign investors and international clients) would mostly concentrate on transactional and consulting business, with very limited to no litigation and criminal law practice. Most of the strong litigators and criminal defence attorneys are not used to work with major international clients, also do not have a strong command of foreign languages. Our team continues to develop a reliable transactional team (especially in telecommunications, mining, energy, construction and development areas, in PPP and related issues).

At the same time, we have developed robust and specialised litigation practice since 2006-2007. Two of our team members, senior partner Aram Orbelyan and counsel Artur Hovhannisyan were directly engaged in the development of the new civil procedure code and arbitration and mediation legislation in the past as deputy ministers of justice. The firm annually handles around 60 significant/substantial civil and commercial cases, several major multimillion-dollar bankruptcy cases as well as numerous smaller cases. Since 2011, we further started developing our criminal law practice by providing services to both the victims (mostly corporate clients against the fraudulent directors and competitors) and the victims. Now

our team is defending clients in several high-level criminal cases (including the ex-president of Armenia). Our criminal defence team is exceptionally efficient in white-collar crime and other interdisciplinary issues, who are able to obtain guidance from the tax law, competition law specialists, experts in mining, construction etc., which enables them to find solutions for the most complicated matters (unfortunately the institute of independent and “humanly speaking” forensic experts is not very well developed in Armenia).

• Good command of foreign languages and diversity. We believe that a diverse educational background, knowledge of comparative law and international legal concepts, good command of foreign language and acquaintance with foreign cultures make the overall team stronger and together with internal exchange and communications tools, make us capable solving the most complex legal issues. In addition to Armenian, we provide services (or at least receive and share information) in English, Russian, French, German languages. One of the new members is fluent in Arabic, and we are always open to having new employees with a different educational and cultural background (we have lawyers who have graduated from universities from four different countries, and even more regions and universities in Armenia). Our young associates are unified by their interest and passion in law. Practically all of them have participated in different national and international moot courts, and have their civic position on a number of pressing issues with high universal values including equality, environmental friendliness, high ethical standards and integrity, no tolerance to corruption and illegal conduct, and are keen to further develop their knowledge.

• Known as experts in solving unsolvable problems- Concern Dialog’s attorneys are recognised as experts in solving unsolvable problems using mental, analytical, creative and legal approaches and skills.

• Implementation of professional liability insurance – We are one of the first companies who implemented professional liability insurance (up to 1 mln Euro). Professional liability insurance is not typical to the Armenian market (and familiar to many western markets), and we plan to increase the coverage and make it more tailored for our services.

Which practices do you see growing in the next 12 months? What are the drivers behind that?

A couple of years ago, the volume of transactional work was decreasing (given the change in government and revolutionary rhetoric), while the litigation and criminal law work has increased. I believe in the next 1-2 years the following areas are going to increase, and some of them are delayed demand due to the last two years limited activities.

• Criminal law / criminal defence. Criminal law practice is increasing exponentially, as after the change of the government many criminal cases are being investigated (some of the real ones, some of them politically motivated one), but in any case the need for highly skilled criminal law teams is in high demand. In addition to the general increase of demand, we are now also increasing our team for mid-level cases with elements of automatisation and case management, which should allow us to provide services with mid-market pricing still being able to ensure the necessary level of service and the quality. We expect the practice to increase by at least 50 per cent next year.

• International arbitration. The last 2 -3 years were positive for the arbitration law practising lawyers. Two ICSID cases are in process, several others being in the process of the announcement. In addition to this several contracts based major arbitrations are taking place (with or without the participation of the state), including ICC and UNCITRAL arbitrations. We are engaged in two ongoing cases for Armenia and expect to be able to represent the clients at least in 1-2 more arbitrations next year. Besides we believe that the arbitration would be more common also for the complicated domestic disputes, as more suitable dispute resolution solution for specific cases (construction and development, complicated work contracts, IP law issues, as well as any transboundary disputes).

• Family law issues (including child abduction and other transboundary family law disputes). With the increase of global mobility, unfortunately, there are more cases of child abduction to and from Armenia, many transboundary divorce and separation, child custody, common property claims. We believe that these sections will be increasing in the coming years, as some of the new regulations of the civil procedure code (specific procedure on the application of the Hague Convention on child abduction, new rules on the recognition and enforcement of the foreign court decision, including interim measures and preliminary orders, which are now being considered in the courts and the practice shall be clear shortly adding predictability in the cases).

• Corporate law, investment structuring, corporate governance, regulatory. Given some suspension in investment activities, we expect in the next 1-2 years to have some inflow of investment, which means they’ll advise on corporate law issues – from the company registration to more complicated structuring of investment, shaping internal management structures etc. The above mentioned would also involve support with due diligence checks, including regulatory issues (banking, energy, telecommunications and media, development and construction, IT sector including IP issues and some others).

• Competition/antitrust law. After the change in the Government, the new Government has declared to be fighting the monopolies more rigorously. Besides, the competition legislation is being continuously amended to address new global developments and match the best international practices. At the same time, the Eurasian Economic Union has some jurisdiction on transboundary competition issues, which are yet to be explored, and we expect a substantial increase in competition law practice as well. All this makes us believe that the competition law practice (both on the competitor-competitor dimension and state-private company dimensions) will develop.

In this regard, we need to be more efficient to be able to provide high quality full-service legal services at a moderate cost, while also protecting our profitability and ensuring proper remuneration for our professionals.

What's the main change you've made in the firm that will benefit clients?

• Concern Dialog is one of the highly regarded firms on the market, which also means we are one of the expensive firms (yet not the most expensive) and most suitable for complicated matters where many other lawyers may be limited to assist. For this segment, we are implementing internal management and collaboration solutions to bring the costs of the client down, and the process of improvement is constant, here we follow the kaizen model and Toyota way of management.

• In addition to improvements within the existing products, we are now getting ready to launch (in the first half of the next year) a mid-market service for day-to-day support for small to medium businesses on their corporate and ongoing contract and labour law issues under a separate trademark (DeLex) mostly by moderate monthly fixed fee arrangement. This would enable more companies to use our services while still allowing us to keep the profitability of the business by using technology and innovative management solutions more heavily.

• Another direction of development is developing more sector/client group-oriented services. We have enacted a unique pricing scheme for start-ups (monthly rather small fee with extended billing in case of success with a premium for the start-ups we believe are useful and with good chances to success). Under start-ups, we not only understand the IT sector, but practically all areas of new businesses with innovative ideas (although mostly IT or IT enabled start-ups).

• Given the size of the firm and its continuous increase, we also formalised our internal anti-corruption, data protection, privacy policies and made them more specific and detailed. In addition to adopting the relevant policies, we started constant weekly or bi-monthly pieces of training on ethical and professional issues for our team, to make sure the principles are part of the company and personal culture as well as the team is updated with the most recent developments in legislation and court and administrative practice. All this is

giving results and further improving the quality of the services via increase in internal collaboration and increasing the efficiency and bringing down the bills.

• Also, last year, we implemented professional liability insurance for the first time for one mln Euro coverage and are considering increasing the coverage in the coming years.

• And finally, we are actively engaged in international legal and consulting firm networks (TagLaw, NextLaw, ISFIN) and deepening the cooperation within the networks to be able to provide services to our client worldwide. When joining the networks, we were expected use (if mostly) for inbound support, but now we use them for outbound services in different areas (we already provided criminal law support in Spain, commercial litigation support in France, transactional support in several multijurisdictional cases in Europe,

support in China and Latin America and the geography is expanding). The membership and active

participation of the team members in the network event allow us to know the colleagues personally and provide more personalised services to our clients.

Is technology changing the way you interact with your clients and the services you can provide them?

As indicated above, we are enabling more technologically enhanced services from year-to-year. The direct interaction with our clients has not changed much, but the implementation of the technology still has a substantial impact on the quality of services and bills.

Better collaboration within the team and the ability to work more efficiently is allowing us to bring the bill down substantially (for some cases by 20-30 per cent), while ensuring the same or higher quality and accuracy of the provided services. Further enactment of e-justice solutions by the judiciary and linking our services with the system, will allow us to act faster and to ensure the timing of the overall service provision (including litigation, company registration, DD checks and other related services) becomes even shorter.

Can you give us a practical example of how you have helped a client to add value to their business?

We undertake the assignment and agree to provide services only when we see the ability to create added value. In addition to general litigation practice (where the value is created by finding innovative solutions, including comparative law perspectives into complicated, previously not litigated issues), below are some more standard cases where we supported the client to create value.

• One of our clients, a major mining company, was having a significant problem with a labour law issue. Many of the employees who were dismissed were filing suits against the company and due to procedural reasons, they were successful in many cases. The client then decided to retain Concern Dialog to support the litigation. After review of the presented claims we found out that, although in most of the cases the grounds for dismissal were present, the suits were grounded as the referred to the breach of the procedures of termination, which was happening due to operations of the HR department not being fully systematised and organised consistently (with elements of automatisation). We managed to close most of those cases amicably. Also we suggested to concentrate on prevention of the issue and based on that we worked with the client to a) undertake full due diligence of the labour law issues and rectify any shortcomings (the labour contracts, but also other internal procedures), and b) to establish with their HR department a more straight forward and quasi-automatised process set on dealing with disciplinary issues, which resulted in a considerable decreased number of suites with almost 90% success rates in those remaining cases for the client.

• Or another example, we worked with many clients in labour law to enact an alternative work time calculation mechanisms, which was corresponding to the reality (in many cases they were filling in 8 hours daily, although the employees were working longer in some days and had day-offs or were working shorter on other days, which is bases for the monetary claims for overtimes). The summary time calculation mechanisms are foreseen in the legislation and implemented correctly, allowed the client to have more accurate attendance lists and decrease the litigation risk without additional cost.

• Clients also strive to find reputable, cost-efficient and reliable firms abroad. Our membership in several networks and active participation in events allows us to introduce foreign stable and reputable firms to our

clients, who then successfully work with or without our guidance (if Armenian law issues were at hand or if they required our general direction). I have described some examples above.

• Yet another example of such support: one of our clients and NGO was seeking to establish a management structure which was logical and extensively used abroad NGO’s (connected with the appointment of the director by the board not by the general meeting, which is problematic for bigger organisations). The national legislation was not flexible in this regard, and the solution was not possible to elaborate within the existing legislation. We prepared draft amendments and a comparative law memo, and worked on the issue with the relevant Parliament committee. Our lobby efforts were needed to adopt amendments to the law enabling standard solution successfully, the related changes in the legislation entered into force, and the appropriate amendments to the charter of the organisation were approved and registered afterwards. Many NGO’s now use this regulation in their management regulations.

• One of our clients approached us with an assignment to exercise a share put option via court process or somehow to secure the return of investment (mostly aimed at a court process). The put option (and options

in general) are not very common in Armenia and are not known to the practice (court or administrative). After the review of the situation and initial discussion with the counteragent, we suggested trying to find a way out via negotiations and maybe mediation, as we saw that the dispute was possible to solve amicably. Despite the company and shareholders threatening to dispute all the investment deals including security agreements in the Armenian court, we were able to negotiate an out of court settlement supported with the conclusion of the transfer agreement. We managed to secure the return of the investment and avoid lengthy litigation with some degree of uncertainty.

• One of our clients has distributed a production line to one of the most significant dietary (food) producers in Armenia with a delayed payment condition. Our client was negotiating for the payment, but fruitless. They engaged us to deal with the issue, and as the agreement foresaw an arbitration agreement, we initiated an arbitration. The other party was again silent, which meant the process of forming the tribunal was taking some time. In parallel we were following the developments around this producer, whose financial situation was continually getting worse. The story was in the news, and as the employees were claiming they are not paid for several months it became clear that the situation was becoming bothersome. At the moment when it became clear the owner was trying to take out the assets from the company, we advised our client to immediately initiate a bankruptcy process to make sure we appointed an interim administrator and ensure the delivered equipment (which by law is pledged) was not disappearing. We managed timely to initiate a bankruptcy process, to ensure the equipment was listed in the inventory and kept in security and managed to sell it to the interested buyer to cover the remaining amount of the debt, legal and bankruptcy costs. Any delay (we believe even by couple of days) may have.

Are clients looking for stability and strategic direction from their law firms - where do you see the firm in three years’ time?

• We are keen to keep up with the current service level and increase it, by further enlarging areas of practice and deepening the knowledge and skills of team members in areas like competition law, corporate law and corporate governance, litigation and arbitration, regulatory matters, GR and PPP regulations and others.

• We are now increasing our criminal law team by improving the team’s specialisation in areas like white-collar crime while keeping up with general criminal law practice. We expect to increase the practice by at least 50 per cent (preferably double) in the next year.

• We expect our new brand – DeLex is functional – giving SME’s ability to use our more standardised services and use our litigation and administrative representation services at a discounted price while keeping the profitability level. This democratisation will allow us to cover more segment and be accessible for more considerable clients.

• And finally, we plan (maybe not next year but in a visible future) to establish an internal network in Armenia to be able to provide faster and cheaper services in Armenia. We now offer services nationwide, but this

means the lawyers have to travel for the court hearings or to be present during the inspections. Establishment of offices in some other locations in Yerevan, will bring the services closer to the clients and make the response time shorter, where necessary, as well as further decreasing the bills for the projects in the regions.

To summarise, we believe in keeping up with the top tier firm quality and become one of the most renowned and technology-enhanced firms in the region with the further possibility of establishing offices outside of Armenia (Georgia, Russia, Eastern Europe). We’ll continue to expand our networks and provide multidisciplinary, global solutions to our clients by combining different perspectives, multi-staffed legal services to individuals, small businesses, large corporations and international organisations.