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 over the past year. 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 presented by LCN together with leading law firms in Milan, Paris, Kiev, Dusseldorf and Moscow, as well as at the ABA International's 2010 annual Fall meeting in Paris. We also authored sections on Ukraine and wrote foreword for the two LCN joint publications: Comparative Summary of Anti-Corruption Laws in the CIS Economic Region - The Practical Legal Guide for Companies' Compliance Policies and the CIS Antitrust Guide. Please read more here about LCN.

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 worked on several major multinational M&As, and were very excited to receive, together with our LCN partners from other CIS countries, the prestigious 2010 IFLR “M&A deal of the Year” Award for our joint role in the Danone – Unimilk CIS merger.

As always, our most exciting and rewarding experience has been in working on behalf of our clients. We have further developed our natural resources and production sharing agreements practice. Ukrainian Law Firms 2011: Handbook for Foreign Clients, published by Yuridicheskaya Practika, features our article summarizing the legal regime for the use of subsoil in Ukraine. Our clients and competitors alike praise our law firm for its profound experience in such practice areas as investment, M&A, agriculture, real estate, construction and land, healthcare, labor, intellectual property protection, antitrust, and many others. We are especially proud that three of 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. And in December 2010 I was 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.

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.

2010 saw 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 fifth anniversary meeting of the Forum was successfully held in Minsk in June 2010, and the sixth meeting will be held in Almaty on June 22-24, 2011. 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