In 2013, the M&A practice held the highest share in DLA Piper’s business, with the biggest receipts coming from energy, IT&C and pharma clients.
However, litigations were a major receipt generator on the Romanian legal market and the banking sector, where financial institutions are reshuffling their portfolios, has started to gain scope for law practice. This is one of the points of interest in DLA Piper’s strategy for this year.
“We haven’t been highly present on the segment of litigations involving banks, though we have banks among our clients. It was also a question of the type of litigations banks have and of their volume,” said Dinu.
According to him, the company has not taken over large packages of files from banks because it does not have a litigation department with “tens of lawyers.”
The company’s headcount includes 35 lawyers, among whom four partners. The team’s expansion would be related to the finance and M&A fields, according to Dinu, but banking litigations are “an issue we are considering and trying to find an angle from which to add value”.
Another major issue on the law market last year and the start of this year is the fact that companies affiliated to networks or international players are unable to negotiate fees with the same flexibility as domestic players.
“It is not necessarily about a market division between domestic and foreign law firms, but some clients prefer international companies,” said Dinu.
Two international firms, White & Case and Gide, decided to close down their Bucharest offices in early 2014, maintaining collaboration with domestic lawyer teams at an exclusive association level.
“There were some reports about certain international firms deciding not to be directly present on the market any longer. Maybe this shows they were facing certain challenges, I do not know. As long as we are concerned, though, I see affiliation to an international network as a positive,” said Dinu.
For DLA Piper, explains the lawyer, the share of files coming from the international network “has increased lately against the first years when we settled on the market”, reaching around 25% of the total.
The domestic office ended 2013 with two-digit growth in Romania, after an 18% receipt advance in the first three quarters of 2013, according to Dinu, who chose not to disclose 2013 financial figures.
The increase posted at the end of last September came on the launch of new practices, which started to generate revenue. The last quarter brought a slowdown and for this year a similar performance is little likely on a stalling market.
“It does not seem to me the law market is growing. It probably remains constant overall. I do not believe it plunged, as new opportunities, new things are emerging all the time,” said Dinu, adding that “among all the fields, litigations had a more solid advance”.
The Bucharest office of DLA Piper was set up by Marian Dinu in 2008. Previously, Dinu worked for six years at the local office of Linklaters and in 2005-2007 coordinated the legal department of Petrom.
(English version by Catalina Apostoiu)