Petr Kadlec

In high school in the US in the early 1990s, I was most interested in politics. Law is a conservative discipline, and in post-revolutionary Czechia it was still too reeking of the past regime. That's why, after I returned to the Czech Republic, albeit with a Czechoslovak passport (the federation broke up during my stay in the US), I first started studying political science in Prague. After three years I also enrolled in law school. For two years during my studies I gained experience at internships at universities in the USA, Germany and Denmark. I also had an adventurous six months at the OSCE diplomatic mission in post-war Kosovo. After graduation, however, I began to devote myself fully to advocacy in Prague. Much of the work was done in English. Prague was still full of expats in charge of privatized companies. However, the Czech Republic's accession to the European Union gave me a new impetus - I had previously devoted my rigorous thesis to EU law. I won a competition and left my position as a lawyer to try my luck in Brussels, at the European Commission's Directorate General for Competition (DG Competition). I spent three and a half years there as an investigator of anti-competitive practices. I also went on unannounced inspections, dawn raids, to companies in various Member States, but I was still a bit bored as an official. So I took the opportunity to go back to the big advocacy, where I cannot complain about the lack of adrenaline. I do law mainly in the area of large public sector projects and I like to return to Brussels from time to time for work.