1. What is the current legal landscape for your practice area in your jurisdiction?

Romania is an EU jurisdiction and its competition litigation market follows European trends closely, much of the relevant legislation being an implementation of EU law. The pressures on businesses elsewhere in Europe, from inflation and fiscal consolidation to energy costs and supply disruption, are being felt here for the same reasons, and they have translated into enforcement. Under pressure to explain rising prices, the Competition Council (the Romanian competition authority) has significantly stepped up its activity: its first no-poach decision in 2025 imposed fines of approximately EUR 33 million on eight companies, and it has been followed by a series of resale price maintenance decisions, dawn raids in food retail and automotive, and sector-wide price monitoring. The Competition Council’s decisions also tend to withstand challenge, the vast majority surviving review before the Romanian courts.

The most consequential development came in June 2026, when the Competition Council fined ten banks a combined RON 3.73 billion (approximately EUR 710 million), the largest sanction ever imposed in Romanian competition enforcement, for what it characterised as coordination of ROBOR quotations, the benchmark to which a large share of Romanian lending is indexed. The banks concerned will challenge the decision and the annulment proceedings will be followed closely. The effect on private enforcement, however, was immediate: within weeks, certain law firms had already begun publicly soliciting borrowers to bring damages claims against the banks.

A potential wave of damages claims will test a framework which has so far seen little use. The Romanian Government Emergency Ordinance 170/2020 (which transposed the EU Damages Directive) was enacted in 2020 and introduced into Romanian law court-ordered disclosure, the binding effect of final infringement decisions, and rebuttable presumptions of harm. What has been lacking so far is an infringement decision large enough to mobilise claimants, and the ROBOR case appears likely to supply it.

Our team is already engaged in follow-on actions of this kind, in industries such as pharmaceuticals and automotive.

2. What three essential pieces of advice would you give to clients involved in your practice area matters?

First, treat the investigation as the opening phase of the litigation. Many companies approach the early stages as a formality and are then surprised by the authority’s final interpretation, realising too late that documents produced, statements made and procedural choices taken months earlier had already shaped the outcome. From the first information request, it pays to work out where the case could end and what will decide it, because the record built during the investigation is the record on which the annulment challenge, and any damages claims that follow, will be fought. The strategic choices available at that stage, from leniency and settlement to acknowledgment or challenge, also compound over time: decisions taken during the authority’s proceedings shape civil exposure years later.

Second, understand what an infringement decision actually settles. Only a final decision binds the civil courts, and annulment proceedings can suspend finality for years. Even then, the decision establishes the infringement; harm, causation, the amount of any overcharge and its passing-on down the supply chain remain live questions in every individual claim, and the statutory presumptions are rebuttable by design. Neither side should read too much into the headline figure. Claimants would be wrong to assume the case is won, defendants that it is lost: the outcome of a damages claim will turn on evidence and economics.

Third, consider the fact that the case will be decided by a generalist court. Romania has no specialised competition courts, and the judges hearing an annulment challenge or a damages claim deal with these files alongside a broad administrative litigation docket. In this context, market definition, pricing mechanics and quantification models (demanding subjects in any courtroom) need to be presented in clear, concrete terms in order to improve the chances of success. Expert evidence deserves the same attention. Romanian courts typically appoint neutral experts of their own motion rather than relying on party-appointed ones, and the pool of experts with real competition economics experience is limited (but parties are entitled to designate their own advisers to take part in the expert’s work).

3. What are the greatest threats and opportunities in your practice area law in the next 12 months?

Threats. The system is about to be stress-tested. A wave of borrower claims following the ROBOR decision would hit a framework that is not necessarily designed for volume: Romania has no opt-out collective mechanism, competition damages actions are concentrated before a single first-instance court, and the pool of quantification experts is limited. The first cases will establish how the courts approach disclosure, presumptions and passing-on, and those early precedents will be difficult to displace.

Opportunities. The same developments might make the market more sophisticated. Thirdparty funding and coordinated claims may appear on the claimant side, multi-claim defence structures on the defendant side, and the settlement incentives under GEO no. 170/2020 may see their first real use. The EU courts will also play a growing role, as preliminary references have proven a tested route in competition cases.

4. How do you ensure high client satisfaction levels are maintained by your practice?

Client satisfaction ultimately comes down to whether the client brings you the next difficult case. Competition litigation sits at the junction of three disciplines (competition law, procedure and economics), and our practice is organised so that all three are covered from the first meeting. Every mandate is run by a partner from first review to final hearing: the partners shape the submissions that matter, argue the hearings and take the strategic decisions, with associates providing substantive support throughout. The team also includes a former Competition Council case handler, which further increases our capabilities on this front.

Two habits sustain the relationship. The first is candour: everyone on the team is expected to say what they actually think, and clients receive the same treatment, including, where the case does not warrant it, the advice not to litigate. The second is predictability: fees are agreed transparently at the outset, and each client receives a realistic map of the proceedings (duration through all instances, cost exposure, the points at which a case can settle) against which we report, in plain language, at each stage. The measure we value most is that several of this year’s most significant mandates came to us as referrals from peer firms.

5. What technological advancements are reshaping your practice area law and how can clients benefit from them?

With the advent of AI in legal work, the document-heavy phases of litigation have changed the most. Investigation files running to tens of thousands of pages can now be reviewed in days rather than weeks and organised into a chronology of who knew what and when, which is often the skeleton of the case itself. The prospect of mass claims adds a further dimension: running hundreds of parallel claims, on either side, is a data-management problem as much as a legal one.

Quantification is changing as well. Damages claims increasingly rest on econometric modelling of pricing data, and the quality of a claim or a defence depends on how early and how cleanly a client’s data can feed those models. For clients, the practical lesson is that structured data has become a litigation asset: companies that maintain clean, retrievable pricing and transaction records will prove, or disprove, an overcharge faster and more cheaply than their counterparties. The authorities are moving in the same direction, investing in datadriven screening to detect collusion, and the Romanian courts now operate with electronic files, while the growing body of published, searchable case law makes it possible to form a grounded view of how a particular court approaches a particular issue.

Two rules apply throughout: every output is verified against the primary sources, and every AI tool is used under strict confidentiality protocols.

6. Describe a particularly interesting or complex matter you have advised on recently, and explain the challenges involved, your approach, and the outcome achieved for the client?

We represent a global biopharmaceutical company in its challenge to the Competition Council’s decision finding that manufacturers of plasma-derived medicinal products coordinated, through their trade association, a restriction of immunoglobulin supplies to the Romanian market. The matter is demanding on any measure: a highly technical, regulated market; an infringement theory built on conduct within a trade association rather than direct contact between competitors; and an authority whose decisions are upheld in the vast majority of cases. Its wider interest lies in the context. The alleged conduct unfolded against the industry’s long-standing dispute with the State over the clawback tax, which manufacturers had consistently argued made supplying the Romanian market uneconomic. The case therefore raises a question relevant to every regulated industry: where does legitimate collective advocacy against a tax end, and where does an infringement begin?

We reviewed the investigation file document by document and built the challenge on specific grounds of illegality, each tied to identified evidence, so that the court examines each document individually rather than relying on the authority’s “overall body of evidence” approach. The most significant development concerned EU law. A preliminary reference to the Court of Justice had already been made in a parallel case arising from the same decision (C-793/25), the first in a Romanian competition case, and it was disputed whether a further reference from our proceedings was admissible or necessary. We argued that the pending reference did not cover the questions on which our client’s case depends, and the Romanian Supreme Court agreed, referring the majority of the additional questions we proposed. We also obtained the admission of an intervention at the second-appeal stage in a co-defendant’s file, one of the first in Romanian competition case law.