Honorable Guests, Dear Friends,

It is my pleasure to welcome you at this splendid reception on behalf of Kubas Kos Gałkowski! I can only regret that I’m talking to you being so far away so I can not fully enjoy beautiful and stunningly modern Shenzhen!

Today it is a very good day to talk about the future – with the last day of the year we are hoping to leave behind us troubles of the past and face challenges of the future.

My law firm is based in Poland– I guess not many of you had opportunity to be in my country like not many of us had a chance to visit different Chinese provinces and cities – I guesse very one knows Poland because of Chopin (Xiao-bang) or my home town Kraków because of Penderecki – but we do share important part of the history. In the Middle Ages Poland used to be a link, a gateway between Western Europe and Asia, today bringing into life the Belt and Road Initiative Poland finds itself at the other end of this link between China and Europe. Apart from the air cargo the fastest route for goods coming from China to Europe is by train and it takes 10-12 days to reach Poland – the amount of shipped goods has risen more than 10 times over last five years and 90% of that cargo is going through Poland.

Now, that brings us to the topic of our meeting, we have gathered here to talk about different challenges of the legal industry, though I would like to tell you about the path chosen by my law firm.

Kubas Kos Gałkowski is an independent law firm with over 25 years of history. We have made a decision to stay independent to develop strong relations with different law firms in the region and around the world – that gives us opportunity to provide cross border services in all European countries depending on our partners needs and requirements – on a daily basis we are doing projects with our colleges in Germany, England, Czech Republic, Hungary but also Ukraine, Belarus, Baltic States or Russia.

Being independent allows us to go our way of growing and developing business – where relation with people within our organization and our best friends from other law firms are much more important than any corporate structures that might be limiting those relations.

We have a team of people who are usually working with us since university, we have team of people who are not only practitioners but also some of them are well renown scholars at the university.

We are very focused on the governmental relations – since many years we engage in legislation works of the Government, I have been a member of the Ministry of Justice experts team working on the new insolvency and restructuring law, my other partners were also working for Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Economy experts panels, the other name partner – Rafał Kos is an advisor and a member of the advisory board to our president. We believe that by this engagement we are not only fulfilling our duty as citizens but also gaining very valuable experience for our Clients.

Kubas Kos Gałkowski is very well known and recognized for its dispute resolution practice (we have been working on numerous major disputes before Polish, European and US courts). We have been among few firms that have led precedent class action litigations in Poland. We are currently engaged in a lot of important cases regarding most crucial industries – energy sector, construction projects, unfair competition and trade mark cases. Experience we are drawing out of those cases allows us to provide more sophisticated advice within our other practices.

M&A and corporate practices are of course obvious – we are here to help you with any European acquisition you could dream of – we can establish a proper international team of best specialists within hours from a request.

But we are also very active on the banking & finance side – two major Polish banks are our clients and we were working also for international players like Deutsche Bank and others.

We are proud also of our compliance practice – a very important one when you are entering a foreign market – again our experience coming out of litigation practice and governmental regulations is crucial.

Coming to the conclusions – our belief is that the best way of managing a law firm in the time of changesis to try to combine together tradition and modernity, to be focused on details but not forgetting about the bigger picture, to be local but globally open for cooperation – I hope that today’s discussion between our honorable guests, Global Legal Leaders will give us some interesting answers to the challenges ahead!

Thank you and Welcome!

December 31, 2020

Dominik Galkowski