Article - March 4, 2007

 

To better understand the way legal assistance is practiced in Romania we have to first explain basic terms and regulations. A Romanian student of Law School has to pass the local Bar Exam in order to be qualified as a lawyer. This lawyer can immediately offer basic assistance and representation to clients but will have to pass a second bar exam to be approved as “definitive lawyer”. It’s quite important to point out that Romanian lawyers are not further separated into such solicitors, barristers etc. All lawyers in Romania have the right to appear in a Court of Law representing clients.

Lawyers in Romania are differently organized and are associated or practice law in a number of different modalities. The most common is the Individual Law Office “Cabinet individual”, with the vast majority of Romanian lawyers practicing law through this type of legal entity. While most of Individual Law Offices in Romania usually do not have more than one or two employees there are some which have a large number of attorneys and auxiliary help. The latter are however quite few.

Besides this type of organizing legal practice in Romania there are a number of medium-sized Law Firms with different orientations: Business and Commercial, Real Estate, IP Law etc. These firms have a number of partners of usually 2-6 and usually a larger number of employees, paralegal help, junior attorneys etc. As an example I would mention Ionita, Enescu & Cuc .

The third main category would be large Law Firms. These are very few and can be separated into Law Firms with Romanian partners (Examples: www.musat.ro or www.tuca.ro) or Branches of Large Foreign Law Firms (www.salans.com) These legal practices assist large corporate clients and government institutions or are present in Romania expanding together with their overseas clients.

The large Romanian law firms are basically legal practices which have started providing assistance to clients soon after the fall of communism and since then managed to work with large foreign clients and mostly with the Romanian State (privatizations etc.). If you are reading this article as a prospective client you will have to take into account that large Romanian Law Firms as well as the branches of foreign legal firms are quite expensive. In other words their fees are similar to large practices in Western states.

What we would recommend

If you are reading this article with the intention of hiring a Romanian lawyer then I would recommend thinking about doing business with a medium sized Romanian law Firm. (This is of course unless your represent a company which will generate lots and lots of business which will need a large number of lawyers). Here are the reasons why I think you should choose this way:

Medium sized legal practices have the greatest flexibility in handling business from both smaller or larger businesses;
I really believe that at this point in Romania it is best to hire a Romanian lawyer as they know best the characteristics of the business world here (and there are lots of characteristics);
They have moderate fees (they do not have the lowest fees as most Individual Law Offices have).