CIS Local Counsel Forum

In 2006, our firm successfully organized the first ever wide-scale meeting of the international legal community with the best national law firms from around the CIS economic region. Since then the CIS Local Counsel Forum became the main platform in the CIS economic region for wide-scale gathering of the leading business lawyers. It is held annually in the different cities of the region chosen by the Delegates: the inaugural Forum was held in Kiev in 2006 hosted by RULG-Ukrainian Legal Group, the second Forum -- in Baku in 2007 hosted by Fina LLP, the third -- in St. Petersburg in 2008 hosted by Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners, the fourth -- in Kiev in 2009 hosted again by RULG-Ukrainian Legal Group, the fifth - in Minsk in 2010 hosted by Vlasova Mikhel & Partners, the sixth - in Almaty in 2011 hosted by Aequitas, and the seventh - in Yerevan 2012, hosted by Ameria CJSC. Over the years the CIS Forum has evolved into an informal network of managing and senior partners of national law firms from the CIS economic region, bringing them together with partners from international law firms from around the world.

The eight Forum will be held on 26-29 June 2013 in Kiev and Odessa (Ukraine), hosted by RULG-Ukrainian Legal Group.

For more information click here

Leading Counsel Network (LCN)

In September 2009, our firm became a founding member and first rotating Chair of the CIS Leading Counsel Network (LCN), a professional network of nine leading law firms across the CIS economic region offering clients integrated multijurisdictional legal advice. The network brings together law firms in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and aims to combine highest international professional standards with a unique local insight in the regions, which are increasingly attracting international investments. The alliance enhances the cross-border capabilities of member firms in the CIS region and offers clients integrated teams, unparalleled resource base and access to the best local knowledge in each country.

We are very pleased that LCN was shortlisted for the European Law Firm Network of the Year Award by the prestigious The Lawyer European Awards 2011, which will be held on 28 September 2011 in Geneva. Please view the announcement and the shortlist. You may also read about it on the LCN in the Media section of our Web site.

We are very active as a network and have worked together on several large cross-border projects for major multinational companies, including the CIS-wide merger of Danone with Russian dairy giant Unimilk. This deal was managed under the leadership of our Russian member – Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners and for this deal LCN jointly won the prestigious 2010 IFLR “M&A deal of the Year” Award.

Please click here for the details
and for the press coverage

Dear Clients, Colleagues, and Friends,

Welcome to the home page of RULG-Ukrainian Legal Group. This site aims to present to you detailed information about our firm, the legal services we provide, our attorneys, and important legal developments in Ukraine and the CIS economic region.

Traditionally, in this letter, we provide an overview of our firm's news and achievements. In these challenging economic times, we are more than ever committed to providing the best value in services to our clients, doing what it takes to help them withstand the crisis, and being their loyal and competent legal partner in Ukraine and the CIS.

We continue to serve as co-chair of the CIS Leading Counsel Network (LCN), a professional network of nine leading law firms across the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) economic region offering clients integrated multijurisdictional legal advice. The network brings together law firms in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Turkmenistan and Ukraine, and aims to combine highest international professional standards with a unique local insight in the regions, which are increasingly attracting international investments. We have participated in a number of joint cross-border client projects and represented Ukraine in several workshops organized by LCN together with leading law firms in Milan, Paris, Kiev, Dusseldorf, Moscow, London and Washington D.C., as well as at the ABA International's annual meetings in Paris and New York. We also authored sections on Ukraine and wrote foreword for the three LCN joint publications: Comparative Summary of Anti-Corruption Laws in the CIS Economic Region - The Practical Legal Guide for Companies' Compliance Policies, the CIS Antitrust Guide, and the CIS Tax Compass. Please read more here about LCN.

As always, our most exciting and rewarding experience has been in working on behalf of our clients. Our clients and competitors alike praise our law firm for its profound experience in such practice areas as investment, M&A, energy, healthcare, labor, intellectual property protection, antitrust, compliance, data protection and many others. We are especially proud that our partners were selected in six areas of practice (corporate, mergers & acquisitions, antitrust, arbitration and mediation, labor and employment and energy and natural resources law) in the inaugural Ukrainian edition of Best Lawyers®, which is regarded as the definitive guide to legal excellence in the U.S. and increasingly around the world. We were listed in the Which Lawyer? Yearbook among only twenty Ukrainian law firms and rated as "recognized" in the field of competition/anti-trust law, "recommended" in both corporate/M&A and dispute resolution and "highly recommended" in labor and employee benefits. Moreover, several of our attorneys were individually honored by being designated as "recommended" or "highly recommended" in various practice categories. Chambers describes us as "traditionally Westernized in outlook" and acknowledged that RULG-Ukrainian Legal Group has always been recognized as having "particular strength in the IP field". Additionally, such top legal directories as The Legal 500, FindLaw.com, Lawyers.com and others have all written up our practice. I was also honored to be included in the Hundred Best Lawyers of Ukraine (Clients' Choice) based on the survey conducted by Yurydychna Gazeta, a leading legal publication in Ukraine.

A special word about our M&A practice. For years we have been working on the Ukraine component of major multinational deals, as well as on domestic deals, involving multiple companies in Ukraine for most of the deals. Even with the current relatively low M&A activity involving Ukraine, in the last twelve months we have worked on several major multinational M&As and successfully obtained antitrust clearance for many more.

We also constantly develop our specialized natural resources and production sharing agreements practice. Ukrainian Law Firms: Handbook for Foreign Clients, Russian Petroleum Investor and OGEL regularly feature our articles summarizing the legal regime for the use of subsoil in Ukraine.

Our compliance practice has developed actively in the past few years and in acknowledgment of its importance for our clients, we regularly hold compliance workshops in Kiev and in other capitals of the region.

Our attorneys have been actively involved in various professional activities: attending and speaking at international conferences, publishing articles on various aspects of Ukrainian law and participating in professional organizations and associations. Information on these activities is available on the respective pages of this site. Professional and mass media outlets often seek our attorneys' opinions on a broad range of legal topics, and to share these opinions with you we have added a "RULG in the Media" page to our Web site.

We are happy to report the continuing success of the CIS Local Counsel Forum, an informal network of managing partners of the leading business law firms of the CIS economic region, which our firm organized back in 2006. The Forum brings together more than 200 top business lawyers from all countries of the CIS economic region and from around the world. Detailed information about the Forum is available at http://www.rulg.com/cisforum.

We look forward to having more opportunities to assist you in your business endeavors in Ukraine and other CIS countries. We appreciate the time you are taking to review our home page and hope its contents prove useful. We also invite you to check out our Legal Alerts, which we regularly post to reflect the key legal developments in Ukraine. Please feel free to contact us with your comments, questions, or suggestions.

Sincerely yours,
Irina Paliashvili
President and Senior Counsel

© 2009 RULG - Ukrainian Legal Group, P.A.