Partner Perspectives: Otilia Vilcu

Congratulations on being ranked Band 1 in Legal 500 for Competition / Antitrust. What did this journey entail?

It’s been our greatest pleasure to be recognised as band one in competition by Legal 500. We’re thrilled with the overall result. It’s been a long journey, although Guia Naghi as a law firm is only three years old, the team itself is 15 years old. So that’s, that’s quite a journey for us to, to get here.

It means for us that we’re doing the right things for our clients and for our people, because that is one of our greatest strengths and it means so much to have that recognised.

What are your firms’ values and legacy – what does GNP stand for?

So GMP is a fresh perspectives law firm. We’re a full service law firm, which aims for the highest quality for our clients and for our people and that’s, to be on point, our greatest strength is our people, the people that we work with and the people that we work for.

And going forward, we aim to maintain our quality pledge for our clients also looking at all their problems with a lens on fresh solutions, out-of-the-box thinking and best results in the most efficient time.

What are your core practices and what are some highlights of recent projects?

At Guia Naghi, our core practices are of course, competition, staying date, antitrust. This is our core team’s biggest strength. However, we also look into pharma and life sciences. We also have a very, very strong team for dispute resolution and TMT.

Also, we look very, very highly in for our clients in the retail and FMCG industry and we strive for our M&A Team to become more present on the market. As far as our recent projects go for last year, we’ve seen a very big boost in competition cases and overall the dispute resolution team who went for the courts for our clients to challenge different decisions by the Romanian Competition challenge the Romanian Competition Council.

So we’ve been present in all the major investigations of the Romanian Competition Council, mainly into those on the automotive industry, also the spare parts industry and MTPL and car insurance. So that was a very good highlight of our work in the past year and we’ve been very, very thrilled to be entrusted by our clients with their most sensitive projects.

 

Let’s talk about exciting old & new perspectives in the competition field in Romania.

So competition in Romania is a long standing practice with a very highly regarded authority on the market, the Romanian Competition Council, which is very active and very proactive in in regulating and enforcing competition law.

So we’ve seen the authority going for bigger and bigger cases, launching sector inquiries in various domains such as telemedicine or automotive and so on. We’ve seen more don rates on the market so far and we’ve seen a more focused approach into mergers and acquisitions and also into foreign direct investment. So it’s been a very interesting year so far and we look forward to seeing new perspectives and new development. What we can discuss more about, and I think this is going to be very, very interesting going forward, is modifications to competition legislation into unfair trading practices across various industries.

So it’s unfair trading practices as a modification to the general legislation where we’re looking at market power and increased outlook of the Competition Council into a market power below the 40% threshold and operators who have to be very, very careful about their actions on the market going forward.

And also what we see as a new sparkling domain is unfair trading practices, implementing a new directive, the 633 directive from 2019, which is going to be a revolution for the retail sector in Romania.

What do you think is the future of the legal profession in Romania going forward – particularly in the current economic context and digitalization era?

So our profession is evolving, it always has, and it has adapted so far to many, many challenges on the market. Recently, we’ve seen economic challenges, we’ve seen strategic and even war like conflicts in this region and part of the world. We’ve had a pandemic that took us on a whirlwind, so the legal profession has proven that it can adapt.

Two years ago, we didn’t have Zoom meetings, we had face to face meetings with our clients. Now it’s become commonplace to hold most of our meetings online. It’s going to take some adaptation to go into the digital era, and now we’re also facing artificial intelligence. It’s going to take a strong and adaptive law firm to make the most of the changes that are coming. For us, it’s going to be an opportunity to shift the way that we work.

So it’s not going to be so much repetitive work. It’s going to be creating content and creating strategies for our clients because most of the, let’s say less challenging work is going to be taken care of by AI. So we’re looking at the future thinking this is our opportunity to be even more strategic and to bring even more out-of-the-box targeted solutions for our clients in a strategic manner.

What are you looking for in a future colleague? What makes a good lawyer in your GNP team?

We’re looking for talent is what we’re looking for. We’re always looking for the sharpest minds and the brightest students and future lawyers, but we’re also looking for dedication and passion. For us, it’s very important to have exceptional quality in our work and the solutions that we provide for our clients. So being technically Immaculate is only part of the equation. What we look for is people who want to passionately discover more about law, whether it’s competition law and we do that very well or pharma or corporate, we want to meet you and have you at our team.

That’s why we go for out-of-the-box ideas even when we’re looking for new talent. So along with the Competition Council and some students associations, we organise each year a student contest, let’s say it’s called Competition Challenge and it’s it is a mock of a hearing and an investigation before the Competition Council. Each year we look for the new and greatest talent on the market in a very practical way by giving them the opportunity to be lawyers for a day, and the next step would be for them to be lifetime lawyers in our team.