About

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

The management of legal services and strategic negotiations regarding an agreement between Google and Domestic Cloud Provider. Under this partnership, Google will open a Google Cloud Region, which is a technical infrastructure and programming hub dedicated to customers from Poland and Central and Eastern Europe in Warsaw.

Legal services for the project of constructing the National Cybersecurity Centre for the government of the Republic of Togo. The project entailed setting up a joint venture, preparation of the draft legislation and financial model and negotiating the contracts required for the project.

Legal services for a project entailing the migration of data to an accounting Cloud for the CEE leasing arm of one of the largest car manufacturers in the world.

What changes have you made to the workings of the legal department during your time in your current role? How has that affected the wider company?

As I have been working in the IT sector I have been using the latest technology on a daily basis. I therefore introduced a new secure documentation flow system (iLegal), which has automated a lot of the document preparation, checking and confirmation processes in the organisation, using electronic signatures.

What are the unique aspects of working as an in-house lawyer in the CEE region?

As I see it, in-house lawyers in Central and Eastern Europe were very much undervalued until quite recently. It was considered, quite wrongly, that the only way to make a name for oneself in the legal profession was to work in a major law office. This is now changing, thanks to The Legal 500’s work and the creation of a shortlist of rankings for corporate lawyers.

How do you feel in-house lawyers can improve levels of trust of between them and their business colleagues?

In my opinion the key in this regard is for the corporate lawyer to understand the sector and the company’s business model. If a lawyer is an expert in his sector then he naturally becomes a partner for the business and can find solutions to problems rather than simply signalling their occurrence.

FOCUS ON… THE CLOUD

During my career I have seen how the law and technology have become intertwined and have also been witnessing the progress of Cloud computing. In the last few months I have been coordinating one of the most significant IT projects in Poland. A global supplier of Cloud services – namely Google Cloud – signed a strategic agreement with my company, Domestic Cloud Provider. As a result, Domestic Cloud Provider will be able to add Google Cloud Platform’s products to its list of services, while Google in turn will open a technical infrastructure and programming hub dedicated to customers from Poland and CEE. Google Cloud will be the first global public Cloud installation in Central Europe.

This is a very important initiative, because relatively few people are aware just how many major businesses would never have made it without the Cloud (like Uber, Facebook and Twitter, for example). The scale of the revenues of the Cloud business is astonishing. In just the first quarter of this year the global revenues of the Cloud computing sector amounted to US$21bn. Despite that, this model of IT services still engenders extreme emotions.

The Americans are the most advanced in regards to the Cloud, whilst the British have adopted a fairly conservative policy of accreditation and audit called “Cloud First”, a large number of European countries have said “no” to the Cloud, while in some parts of the world they are not saying a word but are beavering away like crazy.

At the other end of the scale there are the consumers, who have universally accepted the Cloud, using purely Cloud-based services like Dropbox.

Businesses are somewhere in the middle. There are some sectors which are more conservative. But meanwhile, there are some big firms which are “Cloud First” or “Cloud All” and some start-ups that have no clue what the Cloud is all about. Some build private Clouds or community Clouds.

The Cloud has been very motivating for regulators and lawmakers. I read a legal opinion not long ago, which suggested that regulations like GDPR would kill the Cloud. No one is voicing such fears any more. The Cloud will have to adjust to fit regulations but it won’t disappear.

In contract law, Cloud is already revolutionising things. We spend hundreds of hours in SLA or copyrights negotiations in classic on-premise implementation contracts. We will not have to work quite so hard over Cloud agreements.

Right now there is still a lot of work for lawyers but in a completely different area – namely preparing organisations for impact with the Cloud. It is 99.99% sure that Cloud contracts are going to be completely dogmatic SLAs and if something goes wrong then all clients will be able to expect is some service credit. We will have to prepare organisations for the sad reality that if the supplier changes its service or pulls the plug on it they will be left holding the baby. And 99% of responsibility for the exit plan will rest with their organisation rather than on the terms of the contract. There will be different procedures, different time scales, different challenges and technology will rule supreme.

Lawyers will have to move on from the idea of concentrating on preparing contracts and move on to analysis and judgement of emergency plans. This is a huge field to plough.

In my opinion the direction of development towards the Cloud is already decided and regulations about personal data protection have been absorbed. When I hear the argument that “if I put my data into the Cloud and something happens to it I will never be able to explain why I used the Cloud”, then I have to explain that we didn’t throw the data into the Cloud. In actual fact, I say, the first complaint is much more likely to be “why were you retaining the data in your own environment, rather than keeping it safe in the Cloud”. It is interesting how that affects measures of due diligence.

Despite the various approaches to the Cloud, there is no way back. Many doubts could be avoided by properly editing agreements and formulating procedures just in case our belief in our provider proves to be too optimistic. That doesn’t change the fact that the possibilities of the Cloud are unlimited and that it is worth taking advantage of them.