“It was precisely thanks to the lockdown that we were able to specialize even more deeply in criminal law, broaden our perspective, and enter new industries where criminal aspects are also present,” notes Alexey Shevchuk, a partner at Barristers JSC. In an interview with “Legal Practice,” he discussed trends in the firm’s and the market’s development, as well as his social and political activities.

— How did Barristers, JSC weather the lockdown? Was the COVID-19 crisis a form of shock therapy for your law firm, and how did it affect the firm’s operations?

— Barristers weathered the lockdown wonderfully! Both the first and second lockdowns served as a kind of catharsis for us. We streamlined our practice areas and eliminated everything that wasn’t essential. We’ve become even closer-knit and stronger; we’ve regrouped and are moving forward with new offerings for our clients.

Thanks to 2020, we established a cybersecurity practice and delved deeply into representing clients from new sectors, ranging from intellectual property to the healthcare industry. We’ve built a client base unlike any we’ve had before. To some extent, it was precisely because of the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on the legal market that we began to specialize even more deeply in criminal law.

— What changes have taken place at Barristers, JSC, in terms of personnel and financial policies?

— We’ve cut out unnecessary expenses since much of our work has moved online. Some “vanity expenses,” as I call them, have been reduced. After all, it’s no secret that in the legal business, you need to have five “peacock feathers” to get noticed by both clients and industry peers. So, due to the lockdown, we redirected the funds we would have spent on two of those “feathers” toward staff salaries, shifting our financial resources in that direction.

After the lockdown, the only people who left were those who didn’t share our corporate philosophy. Let’s be completely honest: Barristers is a kind of exclusive club, a small family that doesn’t accept people “off the street.” At our firm, a lawyer is either groomed, as they say, from the cradle, or is here because they themselves helped build the team. We don’t have random people. It happens that someone leaves the family. Some didn’t live up to expectations, some simply betrayed us, and some were just jealous. I fight for the integrity of our team, for corporate ethics, and for clear internal rules, so I’m glad that this happened thanks to the lockdown.

— Have Ukrainian lawyers already found a panacea for the financial consequences of the COVID-19 crisis?

— Lawyers have found a panacea; what’s more, the legal market has “come back down to earth” today. Lawyers and attorneys have always had a tendency to have their heads in the clouds. Like soccer stars on the level of David Beckham, they’ve grown accustomed to exorbitant fees simply because they’re lawyers. But the coronavirus crisis has been a wake-up call for everyone, and now even a hypothetical Beckham is forced to fly to China to play in the local league because that’s where the money is—and everyone needs to eat. After all, our lawyers are used to drinking coffee at Goodwine, and the “English Premier League” isn’t calling them anymore. And fees like that just aren’t around here anymore… So we all had to come back down to earth a bit and keep doing our jobs well. In the end, everyone continued doing what they’d done before, only it became significantly less lucrative.

— What business model do the Barristers JSC offices in Kyiv and Odesa operate under today? At times, it seems that these are very different lawyers in terms of their work style and lifestyle, even though they operate under the same brand…

— We all work according to the same principles: speed, quality, and price. If all three of these factors align, then the puzzle of any legal business falls into place successfully.

Work at Barristers today operates on the principle of an octopus, much like a large nervous system. An octopus has eight tentacles, and each tentacle is a separate nervous system. Each of our offices and each partner is self-sufficient, just like an octopus’s tentacle. The Odessa office embodies the very essence of elegance in the legal profession: white shirts, distinguished suits, and beautifully delivered speeches. They’re very presentable; they are the face of the Ukrainian legal profession. The Kyiv office, on the other hand, is like the octopus’s tentacles, which it uses to catch its prey. But it’s still a single organism that feeds on what the tentacles have caught. And how you lure the fish—whether it’s because you have a big head or long tentacles—doesn’t matter. Here, the formula “quality, price, speed” is what counts.

— How successful are “tentacles” like Barristers Commercial and Barristers Political?

— These are, so to speak, the combat modes of our octopus. Barristers Commercial handles government procurement, serves corporate businesses and corporate clients, and manages areas related to litigation, corporate dispute resolution, and tax disputes. This branch is not our core business; it’s a support function for our main clients. After all, it’s our policy to keep everything “in the family.” We don’t outsource our clients.

Barristers Political is a unique practice area that handles purchase and sale transactions for political parties, election processes, and the training of election commission members; it also houses our arbitration court. It is a fully-fledged entity that operates independently and brings clients to our parent holding company, Barristers.

— Does the company have any plans to expand beyond its main area of specialization—white-collar crime—and strengthen its presence in other practice areas as well?

— No, Barristers will not become a “legal supermarket”; our primary specialization is criminal law and the areas that stem from it. The other firms within our holding group are focused on serving clients who come to us for assistance with criminal law matters. Of course, we’re expanding our horizons, but we don’t aim to enter other niches that have long been occupied by other firms.

— How successfully is your cybersecurity practice developing?

— Our cybersecurity practice began after we started working with the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance as clients. I consider Andriy Baranovich and Artem Karpinsky to be the best hackers in Ukraine today. They perform white-hat hacking, helping to identify vulnerabilities in the security systems of any business.

While defending them, we came to the conclusion that this practice needed to be developed further. Today, Barristers JSC is one of the leading companies in the cybersecurity sector, as no other Ukrainian law firm is as deeply involved in this area. We provide comprehensive cybersecurity services to both businesses and individuals; we conduct a unique type of cybersecurity audit for our clients, identify “pain points,” and offer comprehensive legal solutions, helping people protect themselves against cyberfraud. And, of course, we must not forget about defending clients against charges of cybercrime-related offenses. We understand that regulatory oversight of this issue in Ukraine is currently at a very low level. Unfortunately, online fraud is rampant, and the videos by our attorney Alexander Tananakin show that anything is possible on the Internet: obtaining any data, extorting money, or hijacking a social media profile. Alexander heads our cybersecurity practice; he’s a guru in this field.

— Many law firms today criticize their market competitors for price dumping, including your firm. In particular, strange price proposals have been spotted from participants in electronic tenders…

— That’s not price dumping; it’s pure and simple trolling! It’s a demonstration of our public protest against those clients who conduct such tenders. Today, 80% of tenders boil down to the banal skimming of budget funds and are blatant rigged deals. We must call a spade a spade: this is a cynical abuse of the public procurement system! In cases like this, it doesn’t matter what price you quote, what experience you have, what level of expertise you possess, or what success stories you can boast about. Everyone looks for some kind of conspiracy theory or hidden meaning in our low bids, but there’s no meaning to them—we just want to poke fun at these kinds of tenders, where the winner is known long before they’re even over.

— Tell us more about how your participation in the Kyiv City Council elections turned out. What role do you play today on Mayor Vitali Klitschko’s team?

— During the Kyiv City Council elections, it was important to me not to let Vitali Vladimirovich down, but there were people within the team who used a “vote-buying” scheme. Unfortunately, it was a matter of principle for us not to point fingers at these people. If they played dirty, they would simply be “isolated” and subsequently expelled from the party. Today, the party’s image is more important than one person’s seat. That is why I sacrificed my seat in order to preserve the party’s image and avoid giving anyone cause for controversy. Unfortunately, through certain manipulations, 143 votes were stolen from me—it was precisely those votes that prevented me from winning the seat. The decision was made not to air our dirty laundry in public, and I hope I did not let Vitaly Vladimirovich down. I ran a very strong election campaign and did my part to ensure the mayor received the percentage of the vote needed to win in the first round.

Today, I officially serve as the mayor’s legal advisor. A legal audit of all municipal enterprises will begin shortly. It is very important to me to review the level and quality of legal work in the city council and the city administration. As an advisor, I have taken on a heavy burden, but it is important for me to develop a concept for reforming the city’s legal sector, since there are so many conflicts and unresolved issues.

It is essential that we draft regulations governing the status of advisors so that all of the mayor’s advisors can fully participate in document management and become full participants in such legal relationships. We need to develop quality standards and KPIs for lawyers working in the Kyiv City Council and the city’s state administration, systematize their work, and create a unified legal department that will bring together all lawyers working for the good of the city—most likely even removing them from the staff of municipal enterprises. Such a unified department should serve the municipal enterprises on an outsourced basis. This should be a unified decision-making center. In that case, some random lawyer from some “shady” department won’t be able to sue for a hectare of land based on an old power of attorney, only for the city to find out about it at the last minute. There should be no such blunders!

Interview by Sergey SACHENKO, “Legal Practice”