TOP LEGAL EXECUTIVES
MIKLÓS ORBÁN CO-FOUNDER, OPL
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.
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
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
“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.”
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. 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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