In 2006, our firm successfully organized the first ever wide-scale meeting of the international legal community with the best national law firms from the CIS economic region. The first CIS Local Counsel Forum took place in Kiev in June 2006, the second meeting took place in Baku, Azerbaijan, in June 2007 and the third -- in St. Petersburg, Russia on 25-27 June 2008, hosted by the leading Russian law firm of Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners. The Fourth Forum will be held in Kiev on 24-26 June 2009 and will be hosted by our firm. For more information please click here.

Welcome to the home page of RULG-Ukrainian Legal Group, P.A. This site aims to provide you with 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 and the first six month of the current year. 2008 was the busiest year ever for our practice and for our clients -- a great number of interesting projects and landmark deals were successfully implemented. Although towards the end of 2008 the global economic crises seriously affected Ukraine, our firm reacted with a comprehensive program of modernization reforms and anti-crisis strategy. We reorganized and streamlined our practice, adopted important internal procedures aimed at further improving the quality and efficiency of our work, continued investing in training our lawyers, and will shortly re-launch our modernized brand. 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.

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 2009: Handbook for Foreign Clients, published by Yuridicheskaya Practika, features our article summarizing the Licensing 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, mergers & acquisitions, agriculture and land, media, bankruptcy, labor and intellectual property protection, antimonopoly and competition legislation, and many other areas. 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 issue of the Ukrainian edition of Best Lawyers®, which is regarded as the definitive guide to legal excellence in the U.S. and increasingly around the world. The 2009 edition of the PLC Which Lawyer? Yearbook lists our firm among only twenty Ukrainian law firms and rates our firm "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 Westernised in outlook" and acknowledged that RULG-Ukrainian Legal Group, P.A., has always been recognized as having "particular strength in the IP field". Additionally, such top legal directories as The Legal 500, Martindale.com, FindLaw.com, Lawyers.com and others have all written up our practice.

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.

2008 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 third meeting of the Forum was held with outstanding success in St. Petersburg on 25-27 June 2008 and was co-organized by our firm, together with the leading Russian law firm of Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners. The fourth meeting of the Forum will be hosted by our firm in Kiev on 24-26 June 2009. The Forum brings together more than 200 top business lawyers from all CIS countries 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. Please feel free to contact us with your comments, questions, or suggestions.

Sincerely yours,
Irina Paliashvili
President