Summer is traditionally a slower period for many, including the legal sector, but, if used right, the time can pay dividends for law firms.
Is There a Slowdown?
Summer often brings a natural slowdown. “At Guleryuz Partners, we do observe a degree of slowdown in the work pace during the summer months, not mainly stemming from the slowdown of activities of our own, but more due to the slowdown of general commercial activities worldwide,” Guleryuz Partners Partner Zahide Altunbas Sancak says. “This phenomenon is consistent across the legal industry, affecting not just our firm but also our clients and other law firms we collaborate with.”
A slowdown in the pace of work, according to Komnenic & Partners Partner Nemanja Radovic, “is largely due to the vacation schedules of both the courts and state institutions in Montenegro. Courts typically entirely cease their activities in August, and many state institutions begin to slow down their operations by July. Consequently, the workload decreases as these entities, with which law firms often interact, are less active.”
However, Eversheds Sutherland Slovakia Managing Partner Bernhard Hager points out that the impact varies by practice group: “Usually, transactions take place in autumn and spoil Christmas for transactional lawyers, while lawyers focusing on environmental, energy, or construction law often are busier in summer than around Christmas.” Consequently, Hager notes, summer is slightly slower, but “the negative peak is not as significant as it might in an M&A boutique.”
One practice that normally experiences slowdown, is litigation. In North Macedonia, “litigation work would slow down due to judges’ summer vacations from July 15 to August 15,” Debarliev Dameski & Kelesoska Partner Jasmina Ilieva Jovanovik points out. However, this trend seems to be changing in Bulgaria: “In the past, some of the practice areas – such as litigation – had a natural slowdown due to the court vacation. This is no longer so evident and the statistics show that even the dispute resolution teams are quite busy during the summers,” CMS Sofia Managing Partner Kostadin Sirleshtov highlights.
Ilieva Jovanovik and Jalsovszky Managing Partner Pal Jalsovszky also observe that while summer has traditionally been slow, this trend is gradually changing. “With good annual business plans and workflow estimates at the beginning of the year, our law firm in the past 20 years has not faced notable summer slowdowns,” Ilieva Jovanovik notes. “For a few years, summer is not a no-business period anymore,” Jalsovszky agrees. “Last year was very special in this respect as a window was open to establish family trusts and foundations with attractive tax features until September and we had an extremely high demand for such type of work. This made the summer months the most profitable period of the entire year – we established 77 trusts and three private foundations in this period.”
Holiday Coordination
One natural question during the planning of law firms’ activities during summer is that of holidays. “This is the season when our colleagues take the majority of their holidays,” Jalsovszky notes. “Further, Friday afternoons are not as efficient as during the rest of the years, it is normal that during the summer the weekend already starts at Friday, 3-4 pm.” Radovic agrees, noting that the firm “encourages staff to take their annual leave during this period to align with the reduced demand for legal services.”
Consequently, this impacts the workload. “Some members of the team, including myself, are increasing their average utilization over the summer period due to the fact that we have to cover for members of the team, who are on vacation, as clients never stop working and demanding legal services,” Sirleshtov notes.
“People take holidays, and we try to coordinate the leave periods so that on the one side each practice group remains capable of serving our clients, but on the other side, people do take holidays in the summer and not during lawyers’ peak seasons,” Hager agrees.
Staying Productive
Lawyers find ways to remain busy during slower periods. “We always have various projects on our shelves for rainy days,” Jalsovszky notes. “Not necessarily for the summer but for those days when our capacity is not fully exploited. We continuously develop the scope of our automated documents, which is our phare legal tech project. It requires lots of investment from our fee earners – mainly from senior lawyers. Further, we try to enhance the use of AI in our daily work which also creates an extra job.” Additionally, he continues, “clients never run out of tricky legal questions – which is obviously good for lawyers. Some of them also tend to dig into forgotten, unsolved problems during the summer period.”
Sirleshtov adds that during slowdowns, the firm engages in mid- and long-term projects important to clients. “If we are to start a transaction in September, during the summer we can prepare the Virtual Data Room, Indexes, draft SPAs, regulatory summaries, etc.” Additionally, he says that it is a great time to focus on the collaboration between practice groups. “For instance, renewable energy due diligence for a greenfield project requires more real estate/planning knowledge than specific energy regulatory one and, therefore, the energy practice group should be collaborating with real estate,” Sirleshtov explains. “Collaboration across offices and international practice groups is essential for maintaining utilization levels and keeping clients happy.”
“Additionally, we use this quieter time to focus on internal projects, such as professional development, training programs, and updating internal processes and systems,” Radovic continues, with Ilieva Jovanovik adding that “the potential workflow slowdown is creating opportunity for increases of inhouse management activities, revising and updating marketing strategy, and organizing internal training and additional qualifications of our lawyers.” According to Ilieva Jovanovik, the firm is also organizing summer internships “for the Macedonian diaspora youth, during which they are introduced to the business and regulatory environment in their homeland.”
“We use the time for ‘maintenance’ like updating our templates, policies, client database, templates for submissions, BD materials, etc,” Hager adds. “We also agreed on projects with publishers, so we will dedicate more time to our publishing activities.”
“Summer is an exceptionally good time for our team to connect with other legal professionals, and participate in firm projects such as our recently published books,” Altunbas Sancak notes. “Additionally, we allocate more resources to long-term projects that might not require immediate client interaction but are crucial for our strategic goals.”
Projections for This Summer
This summer, certain events are likely to generate work. “The spring elections in North Macedonia have taken the focus of every business sector in the state, which is eager to see the new government established as soon as possible,” Ilieva Jovanovik notes. “The new regulatory reforms and significant investment projects announced by the winning party would make this summertime quite busy if such investments take place in the first months of the new government mandate which overlap with the summer period this year.”
In Hungary, “the golden visa program will start this July,” Jalsovszky says. “There are a number of third-country applicants who are at the starting line. At the same time, the legislative background is still far from being elaborated. We expect that this will create a big demand for our immigration lawyers and our admin staff.”
For Hager, new legal acts and the need for implementation are significant factors for the summer workload, such as “the implementation of cybersecurity measurements according to the so-called NIS2 directive.”
This article was originally published in Issue 11.5 of the CEE Legal Matters Magazine. If you would like to receive a hard copy of the magazine, you can subscribe here.
