4 minute read
Kristóf Ferenczi
ANDRÉKÓ FERENCZI KINSTELLAR ÜGYVÉDI IRODA
BACKGROUND Kristóf Ferenczi is the managing partner of Kinstellar Budapest and head of Kinstellar’s firm-wide energy and natural resources practice. He is a highly regarded legal professional in Hungary and Central and Eastern Europe with extensive experience handling major transactions, complex projects and regulatory matters in the energy and natural resources sector. He holds a degree in law from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, after which he pursued post-graduate studies in Business Law at the Robert Schuman University in Strasbourg, France. Ferenczi is a member of the Budapest Bar and speaks Hungarian, English, French and Italian.
OF WHICH ACHIEVEMENTS ARE YOU MOST PROUD? Having successfully navigated through the COVID pandemic period since the early spring with the Budapest office, ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our team, whilst maintaining the flawless provision of legal services (whether working remotely or in the office) to our clients and ensuring team cohesion, has been the most critical challenge for me this year, right after having become the managing partner of Kinstellar Budapest. I am satisfied that we have successfully handled this unusual and difficult period both in terms of keeping our team members safe and continuing the successful path in our business. This was also the case on a firm-wide level across Kinstellar’s 11 offices, to which I could contribute as part of our firmwide management committee.
This was certainly the result of a concentrated and true team effort, by lawyers and business services colleagues alike, and I am truly proud of the members of the Kinstellar Budapest team, who are outstanding not only in their professional capabilities but are also excellent people who have held together during a profound and unprecedented global crisis. Kudos to our team!
Moreover, having the opportunity to support our clients in some of the most challenging, complex and novel transactions and projects in the Hungarian and CEE energy sector with the Kinstellar energy team keeps giving me the drill for being enthusiastic about the legal practice.
WHAT DREW YOU TO LAW AS A PROFESSION? Initially, I had been flirting with the idea of pursuing an academic career in liberal arts. But after having completed my grammar school studies in Italy at an international school, which I had attended on a scholarship, and having returned home, I had come to realize that I wanted to do something more connected to people and the economy.
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Name of law firm Andrékó Ferenczi Kinstellar Ügyvédi Iroda
Name of associate non-Hungarian law firm or cooperation network Kinstellar
Address 1054 Budapest, Széchenyi rakpart 3.
Managing partner Kristóf Ferenczi
In charge of position since 2020
Year of Hungarian law firm's establishment 2000
No. of attorneys with license to practise in Hungary on Sept. 15, 2020 29
No. of partners of Hungarian law firm on Sept. 15, 2020 6
Law seemed to be a good option. Following my graduation and a year of postgraduate legal studies in Strasbourg, I applied for traineeships at international law firms in Budapest and became a trainee lawyer at the renowned global law firm Linklaters – out of which Kinstellar was born in Central and Eastern Europe a decade ago. And I have never thought of quitting law ever since!
HOW DID YOU PICK YOUR LEGAL SPECIALTY AREA? In the early years of my career I had exposure to matters pertaining to certain regulated network-based industries, such as telecoms and the rail sector. Subsequently, when I was brought into energy sector related matters, I came to realize the similarities in the regulatory environment of these network industries and developed an ever-increasing interest in this area. The more involved I became, the more I started to appreciate the depth and complexities of the energy and natural resources projects and transactions. Spanning the full spectrum of energy, from conventional power generation to renewables, upstream and downstream oil and gas projects, major energy infrastructure developments, decarbonization, commodities trading and local and EU regulatory issues, you can never get bored with it!
Also, due to the significance of energy to the economy, whether it comes to electricity, gas or oil or petrochemicals, and the crucial (and in certain areas, realistically not replaceable) nature of the underlying infrastructure, the matters I have worked on in the last 20 years included many of the most complex and critically important transactions and investments in this space. From this perspective, my team and I have benefited from opportunities to visit our clients’ actual sites; it has always been my view that you must see the “metal” which your advice relates to if you want to give pragmatic and solution-driven legal advice. WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE TO IMPROVE THE LEGAL ENVIRONMENT IN HUNGARY? I find that the legal environment in Hungary is quite mature. One of the challenges for the broader legal environment here is to ensure transparency and easy access to the wealth of judicial and public authority cases and prevailing practice. Significant steps have already been made to this effect but there still remains room for improvement. As for the legal profession, the COVID pandemic has certainly forced major change on various layers of the profession, who had to change, almost from one moment to the next, to working in an almost fully digital environment. For us at Kinstellar, this was less of a novelty, but of course we had to deal with the impact of moving the team between remote working and using the office, which posed its own challenges. Digitalization of the legal environment is an unstoppable development and the use of legal technology will ever more become the norm rather than the exception.
