They export Western law to the East. Compared to Kiev or Ankara, Prague is said to be a safe ground
This office is brave in blood. In its current form, it formed fourteen years ago, in 2008, at the beginning of the deepest recession. While today it is considered one of the best in the field of corporate law in our country, at that time it had been operating in the Czech Republic for eight years under the British brand Linklaters, one of the largest transaction offices in the world.
Just before the crisis, which London lawyers had been whispering about at the time, the Czech branch, together with three others in Eastern Europe, decided to stand on its own two feet. And she brought Western law, which she had done in the world’s largest economies until then, to markets they were all afraid of, such as Turkey, Serbia, or Kazakhstan.
“Maybe it wasn’t the best time to start with a transaction consulting office,” laughs Lukáš Ševčík, head of Kinstellar’s Prague branch, as he recalls its beginnings.
The overheated economy stopped the majority of acquisitions overnight. They accounted for about eighty percent of the work of these lawyers, and suddenly only less than half of them. That was the time.
“It was a bit of a pilot project for the Linklaters before the Central and Eastern European crisis. The company gradually decided to focus only on the largest global markets and not pay so much attention to small jurisdictions. These brought conflicts of interest if the big players wanted to buy smaller, regional companies. And that happened often, “recalls Lukáš Ševčík.
“On the contrary, we saw an opportunity in these markets, so in April 2008 we agreed to split up peacefully,” adds the lawyer, who is already in Linklaters alongside the Prague team dealing with mergers and acquisitions.