About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

The transaction involving the acquisition of Dotpay by Nets Denmark.

How important have “soft skills” or personal attributes outside of technical legal skill been to the team’s success, and which “soft skills” do you feel are most important for an in-house lawyer to possess?

The in-house lawyer must have the same attitude as the best seller in the sales team, and must ensure that the in-house legal team is always made aware of the product that is being sold by the company.

What are the main qualities you look for in a potential new hire?

An open mind and a business attitude.

What advice would you give to any peers or colleagues working in the Polish market for the first time?

The Polish market is different than what you
may be used to in Western Europe, and equally,
it is different than what you might know from the East. The Polish market really is something inbetween.

What can law firms in Poland, and the wider CEE region, do to win more business from you?

Be specialised in the things that no one else is.

FOCUS ON… TRAINING AND THE ROLE

In Poland, but I suspect that throughout Central Europe, the in house lawyer was formerly treated as the president’s advisor combined with a fireman. Contrary to what many say, nowadays soft skills and a business approach are more important than hard legal skills for in-house lawyers. I was once named by my bosses and colleagues as “the world’s most business lawyer”. Nowadays, he must be at the same time a good salesman and, above all, an advisor to everyone, part of the team and part of the company in which he works. Currently, there is understanding that a lawyer also co-creates and builds a product or service that the company sells. It is created not only by programmers and product managers, so a lawyer who supports salesmen in sales and explains all the complexities to the client, is what an in-house lawyer should be now.

As I write the above, this is understood by the management and employees, but do the lawyers understand it? It seems that unfortunately not. Unfortunately, both at the university education stage and at the stage of vocational training, in smaller or larger law firms, smaller or larger companies, older and younger lawyers see their profession as an expert on legal provisions and rulings, masters of cut statements and sharp pleadings. However, this profession is changing, or rather has already changed.

What to do then? How to change that? How to improve and improve? Start from the beginning. While in Poland studies are carried out by practitioners and each lecture is supplemented with dozens of examples from a practice, study programmes are not directly related to what actually happens on a daily basis in legal practice. Students are not convinced and shown to them that the in-house profession is one of several possibilities for performing legal practice. It is not shown to them that not only a lawyer serving many entrepreneurs from the outside, but a lawyer working inside, even a small company is a fascinating profession, allowing to co-create a business. Both small and large.

Please note that the average Polish law student does not dream of working as an in-house lawyer, but most often as a lawyer in a large office.

Most law abolitionists also get there.
Unfortunately, especially in large law firms,
young, novice lawyers are deprived of direct
contact with the client. Writing whether it’s a
contract or a pleading ordered by a senior lawyer, they often don’t even know the thing without which a real in-house lawyer wouldn’t even write a contract. If they do it for a cosmetics factory, then they have to know how these cosmetics are made and how they are sold, what are the biggest business problems from the beginning to the end of the production chain from the laboratory to the store shelf. They don’t know the composition and why the entrepreneur for whom they are writing a contract need these buses.

This is a real in-house lawyer. The one who knows what is needed in his company and what will happen if it is not there and how it can be replaced [if necessary].

A real in-house lawyer never adds work to anyone
in his company. He solves problems and doesn’t create them. He finds a gap in the law in order to increase the profit of his company, but above all to provide a brilliant product or service to his company’s clients.

This is in my opinion what a real in-house lawyer should be. We lack such lawyers today.