PETERKA & PARTNERS offers its clients special coverage and integrated services in the Central and Eastern European region. We spoke to Dr. András Csehó, Partner, Director of the PETERKA & PARTNERS Budapest office, about his career path, and the firm’s past, present, and future.
Please tell us about how your career began and how you became Office Manager at the PETERKA & PARTNERS Budapest office.
It all started in Szeged, where I graduated as a lawyer in 2007, and then in Hódmezővásárhely, my hometown, where I was a trainee lawyer in a local firm. During my university years, I also trained as a legal translator, English and German, and I wanted to use those languages in my everyday work. That is how I ended up in Budapest, at the Bogsch & Partners Law Office.
I joined PETERKA & PARTNERS as a senior lawyer in 2018, and the Czech leadership and colleagues quickly put their trust in me: a year later, I was appointed as the head of the office. I still enjoy their full support to this day. Soon after, my colleagues Gergely Rendeki-Kovács and Gábor Juhász, with whom I had worked together for seven years, joined the PETERKA team. We have developed a very good personal and working relationship during our years together, which helps me a great deal in my work as Office Manager. I could fully rely on them from the beginning; we could discuss daily administrative tasks and legal issues together. Our legal team was completed with the arrival of Milán Fehér Botond, Péter János Darák, and Gréta Könyves, younger colleagues who complement our well-established trio. I believe that the upward trajectory of the Hungarian PETERKA & PARTNERS office is also due to the fact that we know, and like, each other well. This trust and teamwork are reflected in the firm’s steadily growing results since 2018.
As your motto – “Your CEE law firm” – indicates, PETERKA & PARTNERS has broad coverage over the CEE region. You often stress that you are not a franchise network but an integrated firm. What is this like on a day-to-day basis, how are the offices in the region structured and how do they work together?
PETERKA & PARTNERS was also founded almost twenty-five years ago by a group of friends, working together in a spirit of trust. Ondrej Peterka, the eponymous partner, founded the first office in Prague in 2000 with friends he had known since his university days. From the very beginning, he recognized the potential of the region and the need for integrated legal services among the Prague office’s clientele. Their clients included a number of Western multinationals with subsidiaries not only in the Czech Republic but also in several countries in the region. This led us to open offices in Slovakia, Ukraine, and Poland, followed by Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Last year, Croatia was added to the PETERKA network, and this year Slovenia will come on board.
Our integrated operation is all about being able to cover the entire region through a single point of contact. This means that if a client has a legal need in any country, they can always go to the same contact person, so they don’t need to find a lawyer in each country. This approach is not only reflected in communication but also in billing, which makes life easier for clients. While other firms may offer similar administrative facilitation, we make it a core part of our business, not an extra service. Another advantage is that PETERKA & PARTNERS offices work together really closely, as we work with our colleagues abroad on a daily basis. Our office functions as a single entity; we do not operate under a franchise system, but each office is owned by Ondrej Peterka and the other equity partners with whom he founded the firm. As a result, there is no rivalry between offices, local results and interests do not matter, but we have a regional approach across all countries. So, we are all really in the same boat.
How do you ensure effective cooperation between offices in different countries, especially for projects involving several countries?
As I mentioned, PETERKA & PARTNERS is not a network of law firms but an integrated law firm whose operations are managed by one global management, using the principle of one chain of command.
PETERKA & PARTNERS operations are characterized by a symmetric model of operation: from the point of view of client relations and managing work performed for clients, this means that all of the offices of PETERKA & PARTNERS are equal; work distribution is multidirectional (among all branches) while the client portfolio is the result of the work performed by the entire group, and the clients belong to the entire PETERKA & PARTNERS group, not to a single office or individual lawyers.
Relationships among the individual branches of PETERKA & PARTNERS are based on complete transparency and there is no gate-keeping possible thanks to such a model.
One of the key elements of our cooperation is the existence of practice groups for all of the major areas of law, which allow for an international exchange of views. This is particularly important in the context of EU legislation, where legislation is uniform but local authorities may have different approaches. Within the groups, we often hold joint consultation calls, where we learn a lot from the experience of other offices and get to know new aspects that we can then apply in Hungary. Although the firm has a central marketing strategy, the practice groups are also very useful tools to promote the professional activities of PETERKA & PARTNERS in their own areas of law through specialized brochures and events. They serve also as great solutions for our clients across the region.
The practice groups are regional, meaning we have lawyers in them from each office, regardless of the size of the office. For example, our Czech office has thirty-five lawyers, while the newly established Croatian office has three. Nevertheless, each office has its own role to play, even if the degree of specialization varies among offices according to their size. I am the leader of our E-Commerce Practice Group, and as such, responsible for its activities regionally, also many of my colleagues in the Budapest office are part of our German Desk. This approach allows us to ensure the right expertise in all areas of law and to keep cases in-house, while maintaining the PETERKA & PARTNERS quality service standards.
Why does this structure benefit your clients? How does integration work in practice?
When a client approaches us with a project covering several countries, we assign a contact person to coordinate the entire project. This can be based on several criteria. For example, if the contact person is of the same nationality as the client, they can easily discuss questions and expectations in their mother tongue if required. On the other hand, if one of our colleagues already knows the group well because they have worked for them a great deal, they will be assigned.
The selected contact person will coordinate with their legal colleagues from the other PETERKA & PARTNERS offices. This is an advantage of the integrated service, as an internal process is initiated. As a first step, we hold a kick-off meeting with colleagues from the countries concerned to discuss our views and whether we see a local problem in the case. Then we begin substantive communication with the client, based on the information we already know about their needs.
When our clients from several countries request legal advice on certain issues, they follow the same methodology, and we are constantly coordinating them amongst our colleagues. The traceability and efficiency of all this is ensured by our common DMS system. This is a cloud-based repository where everyone can see where the other country is with the work. This makes scheduling well-organized and easy to follow, as the project manager has up-to-date information on where colleagues in the partner countries stand.
Uniform pricing also makes life easier for customers, not only by providing them with more favourable conditions, but also by simplifying the budgeting process.
Online conferencing and the use of DMS is an exciting step towards digitalization. What other forms of digitalization are present in your workflow and how do you see its future?
For us, a well-functioning IT system is a prerequisite for day-to-day operations. This is particularly important for drafting legal opinions and accessing legal documents, as our colleagues in various countries need access to both current and past documents.
Our proprietary ERP system allows offices in all eight countries to see each other’s activities in real time. We have our own specially designed and developed corporate management system called Pentex, which allows us to share and store all of the relevant data we need in order to follow procedures. For example, you can see how many hours were spent working on a project in Poland last week. There is no need to send separate emails, as you have free access to this data, whether it’s for invoicing, revenue control, or holidays. We save a lot of time this way, both for ourselves and for our colleagues abroad, and it helps our lawyers to focus on what is in the best interest of our clients: quality legal advice.
We are currently looking at how we can further leverage the huge database we have built up over twenty years to identify and reach potential customers. We are developing an AI-based analysis to identify what works in law firm marketing, where our clients come from, and how we can use this knowledge in the future. There is also a growing demand for the use of tele-identification, which allows our clients to conduct business without having to be present in person. Through our relationships, some banks allow customers to do business abroad in their own branch, so they can open a bank account in Hungary. This also greatly simplifies the process.
In today’s digitalized environment, we are able to serve our customers’ needs very efficiently and much of our customer communication takes place online, but we still believe in personal relationships.
What are the most important lessons PETERKA & PARTNERS has learned over the past few years, especially in light of global challenges such as pandemics and geopolitical changes?
Before the Covid pandemic, we had the opportunity to work from home, but it was rare and only a few colleagues took advantage of it occasionally. During the pandemic, however, we had to switch completely to home office overnight, which was a challenge. Fortunately, we already had a digital system in place, so the technical conditions were set. The situation required new methods of accounting and administration, but thanks to the excellent attitudes of our colleagues, we overcame the obstacles smoothly. Although it was a difficult period in many respects, it also generated a number of new legal issues and new tasks to replace projects that had been stopped.
Likewise, the Russo-Ukrainian War raised many organizational and legal questions. Our Ukrainian office continued to operate during the war, and the entire network of offices reacted swiftly with unified action: within days, the Ukrainian office transferred part of its operations to partner countries. Integration and close contact between colleagues also played a key role. When the war broke out, colleagues immediately contacted each other and helped each other. For example, one colleague welcomed several Ukrainian colleagues who had arrived in Hungary into his home. The direct and supportive relationship between our offices is unique and ensures that wherever help is needed, there is always someone to support colleagues. This solidarity and support is what makes PETERKA & PARTNERS special.
In Ukraine, the need for answers to legal questions has increased, particularly in the area of force majeure and the performance of contracts. We have also been approached by Western companies with a number of questions, for example, on the situation of employees. These crises have presented us with situations that we would not have expected a few years ago. However, digitalization and the attitude of our colleagues have allowed us to deal with them successfully.
PETERKA & PARTNERS has been present on the market for 24 years and is growing: last summer you added a Croatian office, and soon there will be a Slovenian one. How do you define your common goals? What changes do these new offices bring to the structure of the company? What advantages and challenges do you see with the integration of new markets?
The strategic objectives of the company are defined by the Czech global management led by Ondrej Peterka. Currently, one of the main objectives of the Hungarian office is to further increase the size and revenue of our Hungarian office. The Hungarian office has been present on the market since 2013, however, in 2018 the Budapest office was almost completely staffed by a new team, which meant that the client base had to be rebuilt with new colleagues. Since then, we have grown year on year and we aim to continue on this successful path.
In our work, we see that Czech, Polish, Slovakian- and Romanian companies come to Hungary rather than the other way round. Nevertheless, there are Hungarian companies that are looking to expand regionally. Our task is to support these Hungarian SMEs in their cross-border activities or in setting up abroad, for example, in the field of e-commerce. Through intensive sales activities we try to identify and contact these companies to support their growth at the regional level. I believe that the future lies in a regional focus: as individual countries are too small to achieve significant results on their own, it is better to focus on regional cooperation.
The Croatian office has already opened, and the next step is to open the Slovenian office, which will open soon. These new offices are as much a part of the international network as the offices we established first. The Croatian office has brought us a great deal of work since it opened and we have been able to send work there as well, so entering new markets opens up new horizons. The next steps might be Austria and Denmark.
In the Budapest office, you work with a close-knit team. How does this help your day-to-day work and client satisfaction? What is the office’s greatest strength?
In addition to legal expertise, I would highlight the trust and teamwork. There is absolute trust among colleagues, everyone knows each other’s strengths and we know exactly who is best at what. This is not just in the legal field, but also in our day-to-day work. The delegation of tasks works in a similar way, so there is no unnecessary duplication. Each colleague has full confidence in the work of the others, there is no need for more than one person to do the same job. Professional recognition is present at all levels, from trainee lawyers to partners.
The workplace culture is also outstanding, where meeting deadlines is a top priority. Clients appreciate that we don’t push back deadlines. All of our colleagues are aware of their own capabilities and limitations and take on tasks accordingly. If someone has too much to do, they can openly express it and we will work together to find a solution. This transparent organization of work also helps to maintain a good work-life balance. We don’t expect our colleagues to work overtime, but rather we strive to ensure that everyone has a good feeling from work and that there is enough time for personal life as well as professional challenges.
A good working atmosphere is also an important strength. The team is made up of old acquaintances working together, which creates a fundamentally good atmosphere. Our new colleagues quickly settle into this friendly, relaxed atmosphere. When looking for new colleagues, we look not only for legal knowledge but also for personality, so that the new colleague fits in well. We also regularly organize team-building activities that further strengthen team spirit. These events are not limited to local colleagues, but extend to the whole of the PETERKA & PARTNERS network. Our bi-annual networking meetings bring together colleagues from all of the offices to participate in various activities together and build personal relationships. These experiences provide long-term motivation and inspiration for us all.
What challenges does the Budapest office currently face and what are your future goals?
Our biggest challenge right now is to comply with recently introduced EU legislation. With legislation such as the NIS2 Directive and the GDPR being constantly updated, as well as a large number of new regulations related to the digital world, our daily work is made more difficult. Our focus is now on providing our clients with up-to-date legal services in these areas as well. To this end, our colleagues are constantly undergoing training, whether, for example, in the fields of cryptocurrencies or artificial intelligence.
The next few years will be about applying this new legislation from a professional point of view. So far there has been a theoretical preparation phase, but now we need to focus on practical application. This is particularly difficult, as Hungarian transposing legislation is often issued late or missing altogether. Other countries have several months to prepare, but we often have to adapt more quickly.
The fundamental goal of both the Budapest and the other PETERKA offices is to continue to grow by strengthening regional synergies and efficiency in an increasingly complex legal environment and in an increasingly competitive market. This is why we work hard every day.
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