Interview with: Bazil Oglindă, Managing Partner

What do you see as the main points that differentiate Oglindă & Partners from your competitors?

There are four main points that differentiate us from our competition:

• • Very direct and open relationship with our clients – the feedback we have received after each project was that they felt us as part of their team, more loyal and devoted even than their internal employees.
  • The main feature that places us at a considerable distance from our competitors comes from the profile of our boutique law firm specialized in a very narrow branch – International Arbitration, Construction and Corporate Law – it is our technical knowledge and our lawyers’ ability to work with complex evidence specific to the client’s industry (e.g. documents, drawings, reports, evidence, etc.);
  • The Hyper-specialization and technical understanding of the case gives us another major difference, which places us ahead of the competition: our high capacity for legal research and case-precedent analysis.
  • Also, from our law firm profile as a hyper-specialised boutique comes another main point that built our reputation as the main choice for Clients in need of lawyers specialized in Arbitration and Construction under Romanian law: the creativity in providing strategies and the ability to anticipate our opponent’s moves in order to always have a plan B. Both plan A and plan B are deeply analysed and outlined from the beginning. Arbitral proceedings are initiated always after a thorough case assessment and after agreeing with our client all aspects of the strategy. During this process we anticipate, evaluate and prepare for all possible scenarios.

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

International Arbitration will become more popular in the next couple of years and the number of cases will grow, especially in the Construction field, in the context of instability in material and workforce prices, as well as in financial-banking contracts, due to interest volatility, inflation, and the lack of predictability of cash flow that affects middle companies – but even major global corporations are not exempt from the impact existing in industries such as energy, infrastructure, and so, giants that the market believed to be among the most stable companies went into insolvency or bankruptcy.

Thus, this unpredictable environment will lead to cash flow problems, which, in order to be overcome, motivates companies to start disputes that can give them a quick result, for the collection of claims to be as quickly as possible, and only arbitration can do this, because only arbitration can give a fast solution, with the advantage of being enforceable almost everywhere on the globe, according to New York Convention.

On the other hand, I think that Romanian Mergers & Acquisitions will develop more and more in the next 12 months because, in the context of the economic crisis and with a lot of Romanian companies becoming insolvent or having financial difficulties, foreign investors will continue to be more and more attracted to acquire at a good price traditional Romanian companies that imposed themselves as local or European brands. The massive flow of mergers and acquisitions in the recent years has also been determined by the important steps taken by the authorities in order to solve infrastructure problems that in the last 30 years have hindered the development of businesses in geographical areas with tremendous potential, providing skilled workforce and low costs for building facilities, halls, or industrial parks. Due to the massive investments in infrastructure made through The National Recovery and Resilience Plan approved by the European Commission for Romania, partly last year, but massively this year, an extraordinary infusion of capital was made in the development of infrastructure and connection of Romania to EU networks, which, in my opinion, further increases the appetite of foreign investors for mergers and acquisitions in Romania.

Also, in the context of this massive capital infusion due to The National Recovery and Resilience Plan, another practice that is facing a notable expansion today, and I give you for sure, it will continue to grow impressively here, in Romania, in the next 12 months or even years is the Public Procurement practice.

There are major projects having the Feasibility Study done and ready for launching the auction, therefore the numerous foreign investors that entered the Romanian market this year (from EU countries, Turkey, China, Israel etc.) will continue to become more numerous and we made the proper investment in order for our Public Procurement team to be ready for this major extension of the Romanian Lawyering Market.

As you can see, I have presented you so far three areas which I am convinced, based on my years of experience as a lawyer and arbitrator, that will grow in the next 12 months. As it always happens in economic crisis, people aim for: (i) taking advantage of the crise and expanding profits; (ii) securing the business.

The practice areas that I foresee growing are those which better promote profits and security: Romanian Mergers & Acquisitions, Public Procurement, International Arbitration (disputes that can balance companies’s cash flow in a short period of time).

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

A lawyer can achieve success only through a lawyer’s cooperation with his clients and I learned that, in practice, to build this cooperation with the client you need to show transparency and facilitate the client’s access to each activity and drafted documents in order for the client to observe and to feel the lawyer’s devotion for his case.

In order to facilitate Client access to lawyer’s activities and drafts, we have invested in the digitalization of our law firm, and in the present, we are able to use dedicated servers where both lawyers and clients have access to the fille documents, can upload documents and keep track of drafts in work.

Classical Romanian lawyering had to change and to adapt, and perhaps the most important change that we made in our law firm, which brought the greatest value to our clients and also to our team’s achievements, was made five years ago, when we decided and trained lawyers to work together in mixed teams tailored according to each project special feature, under the leadership of a partner lawyer, and we have set the wheels in motion for working in multidisciplinary teams.

For example, in construction arbitrations, we tailored teams comprising engineers with a deep expertise, accountants or quantum experts, lawyers specialized in scrutinizing construction evidence plus two partners with experience in pleading and building arbitral strategies.

In addition, to support our clients, we have invested in a modern and highly digitalized conference room in order to provide the highest technical standards of representation in International Arbitration, especially since the covid and post-covid period, when most arbitral institutions have used online conferences to conduct arbitration meetings and even hearing procedures. Therefore, we have helped our clients to optimize their costs, no longer having to support the cost category related to accommodation and travelling.

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

Technology provides an indispensable array of tools for the modern lawyer and I, personally, and our team at Oglindă & Partners, make full use of the possibilities brought on by use of technology.

Firstly, technology directly connects us with our clients. In the post-Covid pandemic era, we encourage online meetings for time efficiency and comfort for our clients. For our complex Arbitration and Construction projects, we use online databases where our lawyers and the clients’ technical experts can share and easily keep track of files and documents. We have also developed an online consultation option on our website, for quick and professional legal advice.

Secondly, technology helps us in our day-to-day activities: all lawyers in our firm have access to and use an internal server for document sharing and remote file access. We use various premium online databases for research and documentation on each project we work in. Also, we use dedicated software for task management and time tracking. All these tools improve, automatize and make our work more efficient, helping us provide high quality services in due time for our clients.

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

We are very proud of managing to create multidisciplinary teams, highly qualified to understand construction technicalities and work alongside engineers, technical and quantum experts or accountants, teams allocated on specific Construction or Arbitration projects.

In this way, we provide our clients a new legal service – a full package solution consisting in legal and also technical assistance.

As practical examples of how this new service added value for our clients stands the success rates we achieve in arbitral disputes. For example, in the last ICC case, through our collaboration with the Client’s engineers, our internal technical and quantum experts, mixed together with our legal expertise, we have managed to add important monetary value for our client and also to protect its good reputation on the market.

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

Since 1990 until now there have been several stages of major legislative changes in the Romanian regulatory system, marked also by taking over the EU normative framework and, this trend of major instability and frequent change of legislation continues to be fully manifested in Romania.

In order to provide stability to our client, we must be able to absorb the legislative instability in Romania. The strategic direction of any law firm, which operates in a context marked by massive and constant changes, must be focused on allocation of time and resources for training in order to continuously update its know-how.

In conclusion, regarding the first part of your question, an investor operating on Romanian market is not only looking for stability, but also has an urgent need for stability in order to have predictability on his business and on its cash flow.

Another key direction for our law firm is the allocation of an important investment in recruitment and vocational training, as we need in the following three years to expand our teams and to add new areas of practice in order to answer our clients more and more sophisticated and specialised needs.