Miklós Orbán

CO-FOUNDER, OPL

BACKGROUND Miklós Orbán is a bi-qualified lawyer (in New York and in Hungary) who has been in the legal industry for more than 20 years. Before he co-founded his firm, he started his career at international law firms in London and Budapest, then served as British Telecom’s regulatory director in 25 countries for seven years. He graduated from ELTE, then earned his Master’s degree at Georgetown University as a Fulbright Scholar. Orbán mentors law students at the Queen Mary University of London and Surrey University. In addition to spending time with his sons, he enjoys reading, coding, running and playing video games.

OF WHICH ACHIEVEMENTS ARE YOU MOST PROUD? I am most proud of achievements that differentiate us from other law firms in Budapest. To start with: OPL was the first law firm in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) which established its own public policy and regulatory boutique as a separate company. EXPLICO has turned out to be a big success and we are now entering into a partnership with two other policy firms in Brussels and Vienna. I am also very proud of our new joint venture with CEE’s premier legal HR firm, Legalis. We launched CEE’s first online platform for premium freelance lawyers with them under the brand, Lexitup.law. I look forward to transforming this platform into an online marketplace of legal services regionally. But I am probably most excited about our global project work where we not only take care of the Hungarian or CEE parts of a major project, but are responsible for the whole piece. We recently finished a large regulatory project where we covered 90 countries for one of the major multinational telco operators. We also did many similar projects in the past. That’s Major League Baseball: we compete with the “big boys” in London and New York for these projects and we have to beat them on our own.

WHAT DREW YOU TO LAW AS A PROFESSION? Get yourselves prepared for the least exciting story. I grew up in a small town in Hungary. Life looked pretty hopeless in the last decade of the communist era: my parents were biochemists, and they advised my brother and I to choose a profession that could keep us independent from the government and political regimes. My brother chose economics, and I took what was left: law. Lame, I know. However, it is more interesting how I became the kind of legal entrepreneur I am now.

Early in my career, I started to see legal works not in horizontals, but in verticals: I became interested not only in legal matters, but also how legal problems arise, and how legal advice is produced. That got me into building a different kind of

legal consultancy. I also had a different approach to law: I could not see law as “given”, something that is carved in stone, but to the contrary, I always felt that law is in motion all the time. That got me into public policy. In addition, it always annoyed me that our legal advice was based on mere expert guessing and were rarely supported by data. That got me into legal analytics and legal tech. And finally, it still strikes me how much lawyers tend to be risk averse, but I am willing to take on healthy business risks. That got me into launching new ventures.

“I started to see legal works not in horizontals, but in verticals: I became interested not only in legal matters, but also how legal problems arise, and how legal advice is produced. That got me into building a different kind of legal consultancy.”

HOW DID YOU PICK YOUR LEGAL SPECIALTY AREA? It is tech and telecoms, and it has always been that way. It was love at first sight, technology “had me at Hello.” I am being serious here. There is something inherently

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Name of law firm OPL (Orbán és Perlaki Ügyvédi Társulás)

Name of associate non-Hungarian law firm or cooperation network Lexing

Address 1036 Budapest, Perc utca 6.

Managing partner Miklós Orbán

In charge of position since 2011

Year of Hungarian law firm's establishment 2011

No. of attorneys with license to practise in Hungary on Sept. 15, 2020 18

No. of partners of Hungarian law firm on Sept. 15, 2020 3

magnificent about technology that excites me and energizes me constantly. People have the misconception that robots and technologies are inhuman or unnatural, but there is nothing more humanly natural than our will to build robots or excel human intelligence with artificial intelligence. We live in a historical age; the effects of the present technological revolution are way bigger than that of the steam engine: it would be an epic mistake not to take part.

What I find most exciting is the collusion of technology with another discipline. If I were reborn, I’d study the collusion of neuroscience and tech. The first piece of legal work I produced was a 100-page-long memo on Internet law which summarized the impact of the Internet on law. That would not be anything exciting now, but it was still in the 20th century when I drafted it and it was a very novel thing back then. More than 20 years later, what I still find exciting in law are the meeting points with technologies, be it analyzing legal documents and laws with algorithms, improving legislation by self-executing laws and better designed regulations, building prediction models for better sentencing, supporting legal advice with data, or the governance of technology.

WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE TO IMPROVE THE LEGAL ENVIRONMENT IN HUNGARY? Three things. First and foremost, if you see Hungary from a distance, then Hungary looks like a decent democracy with strong institutions supporting the rule of law. However, if you take a closer look, especially at how laws are being made and enforced, then you see a different picture. So, if I could, I would strengthen the rule of law: securing the independence of the courts is absolutely crucial. And not for the sake of investors, it is just simply better to live under rule of law supported by strong and politically independent institutions. Second, we are currently analyzing the complexity of legal language in several jurisdictions with natural language processing algorithms. The outcome is clear: There are more laws than before, they are usually longer, more technical in nature and change more frequently. In addition, it seems that the language is unnecessarily complex, which makes it extremely hard to understand for anyone without a law degree. This issue is topped by the deteriorating quality of laws in Hungary. If I could, I’d definitely improve how laws are made. And lastly, we need talented people becoming lawyers. Not only boys and girls whose parents can afford law school and the financial support until legal qualification. We may need to change something to ensure that the best talents can become qualified lawyers disregarding the financial status of their families. The United Kingdom is about to introduce a new law which will allow people to qualify as lawyers without legal education. If someone spends several years in a law firm as an apprentice, and takes certain exams, then he or she can become a lawyer. Such a brave and smart initiative! This is one of my missions; OPL will be the voice of this movement in Hungary.