On 23 April 2010 in Kiev the Ukrainian Bar Association (UBA) hosted the third annual In-House Counsel Conference in Radisson SAS Hotel.

For the third year in a row in-house counsels gathered to discuss burning issues of legal practice, determine strategies and tactics of establishing fruitful cooperation between in-house legal departments and law firms, peculiarities of taxation and prospective legislation and relevant judicial practice.

This year, according to Yuriy Vakhel, the UBA Board member, chairman of the UBA In-House Counsel Section (Nobel Resources Ukraine) the Conference program was made so that to cover the work of each counsel who daily monitors, analyzes and predicts his activities, including management of the company legal department.

Speaking at the opening of the Conference the UBA President Sergei Konnov called upon all in-house lawyers not to remain aloof of the Bar reform process, that may affect their interests as well.

The first session of the Conference was devoted to monitoring the current legislation and those drafts which are presently under consideration by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. Public-private partnership became the important topic for discussion together with practical issues of joint-stock companies functioning during a transitional period.

The second session dealt with courts and court practice. Analysis of problematic legal issues was introduced in the third session of the Conference. The focus was primarily on the most specific taxation issues, namely peculiarities of double taxation treaties application and relations with state bodies. Taxation of mutual investments institutes became another hot topic for discussion.

The last session of the Conference introduced methods of improving management of a legal department of a company. The speakers touched upon the main criteria of external legal consultants evaluation, personal qualities to be taken into account and recommendations to follow when choosing an external legal partner.

Within this session the founder and CEO of the Forbes Institute Jeffrey Forbes presented a study on how in-house counsels in Ukraine and Russia lead legal departments. The first part of the report was devoted to the analysis of Ukrainian and Russian corporate legal departments in the selection of external legal consultants - law firms. In particular, decision-making factors were analyzed, tariff systems and approaches to establish cooperation between corporate legal departments and law firms.  

Jeffrey Forbes noted that only 7% of Ukrainian companies have fixed lists of law firms with which they cooperate, while in 43% of the cases companies haven’t determined their permanent legal partners yet.

The speaker noted that in Ukraine about 80% of companies collaborate with two or three law firms at the same time, while, for example, in Russia 64% of the companies prefer to deal with only one firm. Also the information, obtained as a result of examining the work of freelance legal advisors, was considered in this study. At the end of the Conference the chairman of the UBA Committee on the criminal and criminal procedural law Evgen Solodko (Solodko & Partners) surprised the lawyers with a practical master class on how to protect the company from law enforcement agencies inspections.