Emmanuel is a transactional lawyer specialized in competition law, maintaining an extensive experience with active involvement in major antitrust and merger control cases before the Hellenic Competition Commission and the competent Administrative Courts. He has also handled liberalization cases in regulated markets, especially in the telecoms sector.
He has acted in a considerable number of leading cases related to privatizations, restructuring and M&A, as well as corporate finance and project financing.
He has published in the field of corporate and competition law and he has also delivered presentations in local and international seminars and conferences.
Emmanuel, please tell me about the firm.
We are a leading independent Greek law firm. We stand for creative, innovative, open-minded solutions. We are trust based partners with our clients and have a deep understanding and knowledge of all aspects of the business world. We pride ourselves on being fast and efficient in any response to our clients’ needs. We have been around for more than 50 years, so it’s not a new law firm and our mission has always been to offer our clients the optimum and most comprehensive legal advice in all fields of business law. This is key to everything we do. We are organised into specialist dedicated teams covering core business areas.
We endeavour to strike a balance between size and quality, even though we’re one of the top firms in Greece, we try not to go overboard in terms of size. So right now, the firm consists of about 40 lawyers, 15 trainees, and 15 administrative staff, which we believe is a size that is manageable to ensure the best quality of work for our clients.
We have long-standing experience before all Greek courts, including supreme courts. We have extensive involvement in local and international arbitrations. We mainly have international clients due to our firm’s profile. We believe in being aware of the surrounding business environment and we maintain a solid understanding of the clients’ needs. The fact that most of our senior partners are active members of the boards of directors of several leading Greek companies which are mostly affiliates of multinationals, is clear evidence of the trust that our clients have in us and it’s also an important asset for the optimal balance and combination between legal and business aspects. I think that the reputation we have in the Greek market is our most valuable asset.
What’s your role in the firm?
Mainly my role concerns the management of the company and I’m trying to move the firm forward in the Greek market. I’m a second-generation lawyer. My parents were both lawyers. My father is still active, and I think I can quote Newton when I say I’m happy to sit on the shoulders of giants. Truth be told, being a lawyer now is completely different than it was when my father started. It’s refreshing and instructive to hear stories from my father’s practice 50 years ago. It’s a completely different world. I’m one of the administrators of the firm and head of the M&A division. I have helped transform our practice into the modern legal world, not only theoretically, but I believe also practically. Our current premises, for example, are located in an office building where we occupy two storeys. We relocated in 2016. That was an important step, and I was very active in this initiative. Before 2016 we were located in a building that was initially designed for home use. Now don’t get me wrong, those too were impressive offices even back then and in the city centre but even though we transformed the space, it was never a proper office. You visited our new office. It’s a skyscraper. It’s open plan. And we’ve built everything from scratch. Everything was demolished inside, and the interior is completely new and the good thing is that we were able to implement a floor plan based on our productivity and needs.
How are you moving the firm forward? What’s the strategy there?
Well, the strategy, first of all, is to move to meet the new era. For example, we have implemented a lot of AI and we’re trying out a lot of software in that regard. Actually, it’s not 100% ready yet, but you need to be ready to embrace new things and not worry overly that things aren’t 100% ready.
For some older lawyers it’s a little bit difficult because they cannot grasp the reality of an algorithm doing the job that the human mind has done up until now. My generation – I was born in ’71 – has more or less made peace with that. But I still want to believe, I’m not sure if it’s true, but I want to believe that the human mind is something special and that we will always have a role to play in creative jobs like being a lawyer. Having said that, there’s a lot of things that AI can help you with. I was hugely impressed, for example, with the tool for due diligence. It’s amazing what it can do.
Now what is most important for me in those things? Because at this point in time, it can never take the place of a human, but it has consistency. So for example, one of the things that I did was to use this tool in old due diligence matters to see if we missed something in the past. The interesting thing is that because the AI is not a human it will miss creative things. So if you’re trying to find something that needs some sort of combination between clauses and what is hidden behind the text, that cannot be done by AI, at least not yet. But as far as consistency is concerned, it does a hell of a job.
Does the AI have access to your data and your CRM?
Yes. And it is difficult. The difficulty was in educating the system because this is a huge investment. It’s not just the financial investment. That’s just a number. You pay up and that’s it. It’s a cost which you either can or can’t tolerate. But it also needs a huge investment in terms of the hours and hours of educating the system and you need to tell it what a change of control clause is, for example. This is it. Then it starts bringing up things like “is that one?” and you have to go through and say yes, this is one or no, that is not. And this takes a lot of time but once you’ve done that, the result is consistent and now it is important to understand that you will have both costs. You cannot get rid of the lawyers, and you cannot get rid of the algorithm. You have to use both of them and by using both of them you have a better result and you’re getting ready for the future.
In terms of your personal practice, do you spend most of your time on M&A?
There’s a new term that is used. I have seen it over the last five years and that’s transactional lawyer. That’s exactly what I do. Mainly in M&A, corporate law, competition, privatisations, but my main field concerns the overall transaction. And this goes beyond just legal. After a certain age and rank or whatever you call it, there is always more than just being a lawyer. So I can interact with the lawyer, the lawyer can tell me what he thinks, but it’s not what the client wants. I can translate that, and I can organise the teams better moving forward. I can have the whole picture and try to put together all the pieces and determine what is needed for a deal to go through.
There’s a joke that I have with a colleague of mine here who is also a transactional lawyer. Sometimes we joke: “oh wait, for that we need to ask a lawyer”. We say this because for procedural things, courts, things like that you cannot have all the information. You need a lawyer in the traditional sense. This is why big law firms have a very good track record because when you go into a transaction, they have a team of 10 or 15 people where everybody has their own narrow field of view and you’ve got one person that looks after the whole project and he can decide the direction. He can say in this case we’ll prefer the tax liability or the corporate liability or if it’s better to go this way and you can also explain to the client what the actual risk is. Because there’s the theoretical risk which anybody can tell you by reading a book or having some case law, and then there is the practical risk: will it ever happen? Businessmen take risks. That’s what they do. They don’t want you there in order to eliminate risk altogether. They want you to reduce risk and to help educate them in the practical risks. So they want to take risks that they understand and just stack the odds in their favour.
Are you seeing any developing trends in the Greek market? Are there any growth areas either in terms of practice areas within the firm or in industry sectors?
Well, energy is something which is skyrocketing right now. Green and renewable energy is very high on the agenda. This also driven from the fact that Europe wants to be self-sufficient. It has lost the bet on the policy that it had with Russia and this has backfired and all of a sudden all the countries are trying to find energy sources and be self-sufficient. Greece is in a unique position because it has sun all year round, it has wind all year round. And a lot of it. It has a lot of renewable energy and it’s just starting to get some momentum and traction in that sector. Europe is seeing this and is pouring a lot of money this way just for the investments to take place. There is also a trend in technology where lots of giant tech companies are coming to Greece: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. Greece was not on their radar years ago but now it firmly is. I like to compare Greece with Israel in the sense that we have very, very good brains. And even though we sometimes lack discipline and structure, which is something that we could really use a helping hand with, the creativity and the whole entrepreneurial and business mindset is very evident. So, we currently have a lot of companies that are international and are based in Greece. You need to understand that Greece now is in a completely different place than it was five years ago.
I can give you two examples. The first is a personal example: I do not carry a wallet. Nothing. I have everything in my phone, my ID and driver’s licence are through an app provided by the Greek state. Amazing, right? The Greek state has an official app that you can use in Greece for your ID and your driver’s licence. And payments. No cash. I have no cash. Well, I have a small amount between my phone and its case just for emergencies but other than that I just use a credit card that I do not physically have with me. I have no keys, no car keys, no keys for my house. Nothing. I just have my phone. That would be unimaginable five years ago.
Do you not think that a cashless society dissociates people? The elderly for example who might struggle to adapt or the poorest in society who are scraping by and don’t need the government knowing exactly what they’ve spent and where they’ve spent it.
You’re right but take this argument two or three hundred years ago, when money was introduced, you would have exactly the same argument. All people cannot use money. They do not understand. They cannot add. What are they going to do? They want to take some eggs and exchange them for something that they want. What are you going to do with those people? I mean, this is always an argument for evolution and change. I agree with you, this is a real problem, and we should take it very, very seriously. We should provide all the means to old people to be able to still function in society. I also agree on the overview of the state. We should have clear mechanisms on how data is protected, and this is very high on the EU agenda. You can see that in other jurisdictions like China for example where they have no laws whatsoever for GDPR or similar. On the one hand they can find the criminal within seconds because they have all the data in their hands. Would you say that this is a good thing? Not when they use it for non-criminals.
The second example is on the professional side. To interact in Greece with most of the authorities, you used to need declarations, powers of attorney, and things like that. You would have to physically visit the Government department and have a public servant certify your signature. Not anymore. Now, you have online accounts which you access, pass some authentication process that they have and that’s it. You produce an electronic document that is 100% valid to use in your day-to-day dealings with the state.
Just a couple of days ago I had to file a petition for a change in the cadastral for something that was a simple thing. In the past that would take roughly a week. You would have to certify all your powers, everything, all of the data, go physically over there to file, speak to the clerk, follow up, get the slips to pay what you have to pay to the state, and so on. Now it was done in less than an hour.
Why did you get into the law in the first place? Presumably it was a family business. Did you have a choice?
It’s not that simple. Look, I always liked logic and argument. It would be nice if this was the main reason that led me into law. Truth been told, it was probably a variety of reasons and circumstances. Both my parents were lawyers. My father is still working, by the way, and very active, even pushing 86. But I can tell you this, what is more important is what has kept me in law. And this is more important because at the time I had to decide what to do, I didn’t have the brain power or the maturity to decide. Was it a good decision or a bad decision? Your guess is as good as mine. Of course, it’s easy to say: but look you’re successful, etc. But we will always wonder if I became something else would I be more successful.
What kept me in law is the challenge of finding solutions. Managing people, having structured thoughts, breaking down every problem into smaller ones until you can solve them. I think that’s what makes a good lawyer. Just like a good businessman can identify opportunities and know instantly, if one idea is good or bad, which is something that I cannot do, I’m not a businessman, a good lawyer should be able to plot a path from point A to point B, taking into consideration all the variables, the knowns, and the unknowns, and provide helpful intel to the businessman. So you get the vision from the client where they want to go from where they are, provide us with additional hints of what they are willing to do and not do. And from there you have to plot the route in a way that is efficient and has the fewest problems and liabilities and preferably, the cheapest.
For somebody who wants to go into law, I would tell them that it’s like knowing the source code of any programme. That’s the idea. It’s like being able to see beyond the first line of the argument and understand the logic behind any problem. And this I find very rewarding. I also play music, so I like things that are not 100% logical but nevertheless, my base and my foundation is logic. And this is what law is based on.
If you didn’t go into the law, was there anything else that attracted you when you were making the decision or even now with hindsight?
The problem now is that even though I’m not a businessman, I can see that with my experience a lot of times I have more logic than a lot of businessmen. This is intriguing, but I’m not sure if this would be something that I would be willing to do. I like IT very much. I can code, I can do things that a normal lawyer cannot do in that regard. In my free time I set up all networks and IT infrastructure in my house and in the beginning, everything in the office was managed by me. This might be something that I could do or have done in the past, and it’s something that I always liked. Now, whether this would be better than law, I have no idea.
Do you have any particular work highlights in your career so far?
I would say that one of the most challenging deals was one involving three groups of entities of different nationalities that needed to come together to bid before the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund. They were from Germany, France, and Russia. It was a real challenge to meet the needs of all groups and find the balance between their operation models and the cultural differences. The Germans were German, the French were French, and the Russians were Russian. And keep in mind that none of these entities had cooperated in the past, so it was impossible to draw on their previous collaborations that could have created much needed trust, coupled with all the pressure of very tight and specific deadlines. It was a very challenging time.
Due to the political situation in Greece, this was in 2017, we managed the deal in London so that there could be no demonstration that could block the filing of the offers. That was a very clever trick of the fund. And right up until the moment of filing there were things to sort out. The most challenging was not the application itself. The most challenging thing in this case was to create bridges that brought together the different culture groups so that they could agree on a common path. We had to create safeguards, safety valves and, mechanisms to make everybody feel safe. It was a very difficult balance, and there was no certainty that the deal would actually go through. We managed to get it over the line with a very good ending. We filed a competitive bid and got the asset. They still have the asset and we’re still with the client.
This is one of our major differences with other big Greek law firms: the clients stay with us. Usually in big law firms, what happens is that the client sees the managing partner on day one but never sees them again and then they just speak with a random person in the firm. Often, they do not get the attention that they feel they should get and they leave. Actually, this is one of my main goals: I always make it a point to keep up with the client, if I see him the first time, I make sure that I see him afterwards as well as often as he needs and I will always answer the phone.
In terms of your client relationships, do you have a formalised listening programme or feedback programme?
Yes and no. I mean, we do not run a feedback programme, but we receive information from the legal guides. The way that the legal guides have evolved, they take into consideration all the input from the clients, from the peers and from the peers’ clients for ranking purposes and they build up a profile and you can pay and get exactly that. We are thinking of implementing a more structured programme in the future and it is in the agenda maybe as an online tool.
In terms of listening that is something we do take the time to do. At some point I will always say to my client: “listen, let’s put our pencils down. I need to know that you’re happy. I need to know that you don’t have any issues and if you do have issues, I want to talk about resolving them.” I encourage other members of the firm to do this too. It’s how we can get better.
What are the best things about living and working in Athens?
The first thing is the weather. There’s sun all year round and a mild climate, but we still get snow and cold in the winter, so you get everything. I remember I did my studies in Lille, France, which is in the North. In the beginning it was nice, it was misty, it was something different. But then, after a while waking up and not seeing the sun for days on end it was devastating for me. My brother doesn’t have that issue. He lives in Brussels and he’s happy. He doesn’t care. I, on the other hand couldn’t do that. I mean, if I had to, I would, but if I have the choice, I need the sun. I need to get up in the morning and get the energy that I need. This is how I get the energy.
Athens is also a big city, but it still has character. It has places to go. It has a cultural life and it has the sea. And I also tell you something that a client told me. He’s an international client that has worked in various places in Europe because he’s working for a multinational, and he came here and he was extremely happy. He told me this is the best place! I’ve got everything here and the airport is never more than 50 minutes away from wherever you are in Athens. And there are flights everywhere. So what else do you want?
Athens is a very, very good place to live and work. We have the sea, we have mountains, we have everything. One of the main problems of Athens and Greece in general used to be the day-to-day relationship with the state – all the bureaucracy, everything you had to do just to get on with your life. But this is getting better now and if things continue to get better, it will become an ideal place to be because you have everything.
Are you still riding your motorcycle?
Of course!
What do you have now?
A BMW 1250 GS Adventure.
Are you tempted by the new 1300 GS?
I’m going to wait for the adventure version because I want the big tank. I want a huge bike. And by waiting they will fix all of the small problems of the initial run, so you get a better product in the end. But I think I will get a new one eventually. I always do. The bike will be better but will have less character. I remember the first GS I had, a red 1100 GSA. It had so much character. I mean the gears were clunky, it would make a huge noise, and everybody could hear that you’re changing gears. You needed respect the bike you and ride it with a completely different mindset. It’s not the case now. They’re becoming more friendly, quieter. They have become less capricious but also less characterful as well.
What else do you like to do with your spare time?
I love to spend time with my family, which can be difficult because nowadays with all the communication gadgets, everybody can find you 24/7, which disrupts your personal life. I like running long distances, I run roughly 60 to 70 kilometres per week. This is my main activity outside of work. It helps me organise my thoughts, get rid of any stress and excess energy. I run my first Marathon when I turned 50. I try to manage all the high-tech aspects of my life. I’ve got everything set up at home, everything is electronic. I like music. I play piano and guitar. I think I’ve also infected my kids with the music bug as they also enjoy playing it.
Emmanuel’s professional highlights include:
- Represented Attica Bank in the context of the HCC’s investigation in the Greek banking sector on alleged anti-competitive agreements between the biggest Greek Banks and Interbanking Systems Dias S.A., covering very wide areas, including inter-bank charges, loan and deposits interest rates, credit cards etc. We provided advice during the entire scope of the investigation, including the dawn raid and all subsequent investigatory and procedural steps. The matter involved the biggest dawn raid that the HCC has ever conducted up to date. Overall the investigation drew significant public attention due to its scope and involved market players (the biggest Greek credit institutions). We were successful in agreeing on a settlement with the Hellenic Competition Commission.
https://www.epant.gr/en/enimerosi/press-releases/item/2779-press-release-fines-totaling-41-756-180-10-euro-imposed-on-five-banks-and-the-hellenic-banking-association-hba-along- with-the-imposition-of-a-behavioural-remedy-following-decision-adopted-under-the-settlement-procedure.html
- Intervened in favor of HCC before the Administrative Court of Appeal concerning Athenian Brewery’s appeal against HCC’s decision imposing a fine of € 31 million for abuse of dominance. The court, following the hearing in January 2017, essentially rejected Athenian’s appeal, reducing the fine by merely 15%. Athenian appealed before the Supreme Administrative Court, but said appeal was again rejected, so the case now closed successfully for the client. Decision recently upheld by the Court of Appeal. The case addressed economic analysis issues, following recent European court judgements in Intel case and we’ve handled the case from the level of the Competition Commission.
- Advised Thessaloniki Port Authority S.A. on the procedural, DD on the Port of Igoumenitsa as well as on the Port of Volos, reviewed SPA’s, SHA, Concession Agreement, for the sale of 67% of the shares of the Company that operated the Port of Igoumenitsa and Volos, through the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (taiped.gr). This was a complex transaction comprising of a DD in the Port, review of all transactional documents (SPA, SHA, Concession Agreement) and following the procedure for the submission of the Offer. We were the successful bidder in the Port of Volos and we are awaiting the award and closing.
By David Adams, Managing Editor, Top Ranked Legal