Florian Nitu on drivers of development in the Romanian legal services market

1) What do you see as the main points that differentiate Popovici Nitu Stoica & Asociatii from your competitors

The Popovici name is associated with legal service in Romania since the beginning of the last century.

Our Firm has linked its name with the creation of the essential Romanian market economy institutions after the fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989. We have contributed to the setting up of the property funds of the stock exchanges and of numerous regulatory agencies and judicial bodies.

For the past three decades significant investment and acquisitions projects on the local market have been carried out with the legal assistance of Popovici Nițu Stoica & Asociații.

Most of the Popovici Nițu Stoica & Asociații team members have specialized in a wide range of practice areas in numerous jurisdictions, with prestigious universities from Paris to London, Washington to New York, from Rome to The Hague.

State of the art legal knowledge embedded in a purely entrepreneurial approach make us different.

2) Which practices do you see growing in the next 12 months? What are the drivers behind that?

There are significant opportunities for growth in may practice areas from greenfield and industrial investments to energy, oil and gas, and from real estate to agribusiness, but also in the financial sector, banking and capital markets, in the IT and Telecommunications, healthcare and pharma.

in general, the Romanian M&A market is expected to flourish in 2024 with other billion Euro transactions on the horizon. Indeed, in many sectors consolidation process completed and exit scenarios are considered and in numerous industries billion Euro plus transactions are ripe for the picking.

3) What's the main change you've made in the firm that will benefit clients?

We at PNSA have put together in the recent years a legal tech platform under pnsa.legal where we provide legal support at no charge to clients in order to help them reshape certain corporate functions within organization that are traditionally subject to on site legal assistance and representation, meaning (i) corporate-secretarial and business administration; (ii) compliance and control; (iii) procurement; (iv) HR and resource management; and (v) private public interface.

4) Is technology changing the way you interact with your clients, and the services you can provide them?

It does indeed. Digitalization and commoditization of legal services are no longer just concepts. Many companies these days actively use various legal technology tools and do significant legal data processing via customized legal software platforms. And we at PNSA encourage them to do so and support them actively in better designing their needs for such tools and efficiently exploiting them. We do help clients in selecting and retaining legal tech analysts and in defining and assigning such dedicated functions within the organizations. We define and implement tech-based standard legal instruments and contribute all efforts in creating and expanding what is generally referred to as the “client-attorney cyberspace.”

5) Can you give us a practical example of how you have helped a client to add value to their business?

PNSA Dispute Resolution Practice Group has developed over decades and thousands of cases a Claim Management Legal Suite that we offer clients for their litigation portfolio on a catch all basis, all accompanied with certain legal risk hedging agreements. It serves best clients’ needs in terms of management of the litigation related contingent liability, it may also serve us as counsel, as a differentiator in the market and in many cases it also proves a very lucrative package.

6) Are clients looking for stability and strategic direction from their law firms - where do you see the firm in three years’ time?

While there are many clients that do sort of extreme forum shopping, our experience of investing in long term established relationships proved the correct one. We are happy to see many client relations celebrating 10 years or 20 years or even 30-years of un-interrupted collaboration with our firm. We have always invested based on an organic growth strategy - in our teams, in our practices and in our client development - and will continue to do so. We have expanded our scope in legal cutting-edge areas and have also made the risk profile of our economic model more elastic.