ESOP’s leadership #6 | Make sure your ESOP remains an ESOP | Ubiquitous compromise

Robert Neruda

In my third year at law faculty, I went to Professor Bejček's lecture on competition law and ... I was lost. I was dealing with antitrust law as a student, as a trainee at the Office for the Protection of Competition, as an author of several books, as a lecturer, as a deputy chairman of the Office for the Protection of Competition, I worked at the court, until life took me to the legal profession. I like to learn how markets work, it fascinates me to be around great things. Competition law is the most, it sucks you in, but there is a risk it will drive you crazy. That's why I compensate: I run furiously and cheer a little less furiously at hockey games.

Ondřej Florián

Why have I been practicing corporate law for fifteen years? The question should rather be "why on earth not?" Corporate law contains everything a lawyer can wish for. From the contractual agenda in the form of drafting shareholder agreements to the contentious agenda in litigating shareholder disputes in court or hostile shareholder meetings. From the clear-cut rules of mergers, demergers or changes of legal form (yes, I like rules) to the routine (and sometimes reassuring) small-corporate officialdom of changes of directors, headquarters or trading companies. If you add to this the largest and most importantly the best (!) corporate law team in Central Europe, you will understand why I have been with HAVEL & PARNERS since college. Oh, and I also play tennis, hockey, run, cycle and spend most of my time on the golf course looking for golf balls.

Petra Joanna Pipková

I actually hated the study of law, or law as such. Until one day my father told me, try one more year in Germany and, if you don't enjoy it even then, you can go and study something else. In Germany, I got on a course in competition law by mistake and completely fell for it. Although it is actually a question to what extent competition law is still about law and to what extent it is actually about economics, behavioural economics, sociology, psychology, etc. In any case, it is fascinating. Then, during a visit to a research library, my second passion caught my eye, and that is contract law. Thanks to the increasing number of damages claims for breach of competition law, I can finally link these two passions.

Ivo Šimeček

When I was deciding on law school, I had a feeling I was going to miss something. I also enjoyed science and mathematics, and at grammar school I studied in a class focused on programming. So I added a degree in economics to my law degree. Subjects that repelled others, such as statistics and economic and mathematical methods, I really enjoyed. After school, competition law was a logical choice for me, but during my short stint at the Office for the Protection of Competition, I also “sniffed” at public procurement. Today, with hindsight, I feel that it all came together quite nicely. Competition law itself is halfway between law and economics. My knowledge of public procurement gives me a good understanding of bid-rigging agreements. Well, and programming? That's there too, only instead of using “if then else”, you use the terms hypothesis, disposal, sanction.

Barbora Břežná

My path to law was not at all straightforward. My mother suggested studying it in my fourth year at grammar school without much success - I told her then that she must be crazy and I went to study psychology. But a year and a half later I was already sitting in seminars at the Brno Law School. Without being quite aware of how I got there in the first place, I found a liking for paragraphs. Among all the legal disciplines, I was most passionate about business and especially corporate law, which is what I am currently focusing on. My enthusiasm in this area has not left me to this day.

Kamil Kovaříček

I chose corporate law as my major in high school. It remained my personal favourite during both my master's studies at the law school and during my postgraduate studies and rigorosis proceedings. I focus specifically on the area of corporate equity, which is very little covered in the Czech environment compared to the abroad, also due to the break of rational rules of commercial law in our country for almost forty years. Thus, to some extent, I find the re-discovery of the foundations and principles of capital companies for the Czech context very interesting even in this otherwise relatively conservative area.