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Tamás Polauf
BACKGROUND Tamás Polauf is 45 years old and was admitted to the bar 15 years ago. He has been working for CERHA HEMPEL (formerly CHSH), a Vienna-based law firm, since 2008. In 2013, the partners of the Hungarian entity of CERHA HEMPEL's network of law firms elected him to serve as co-managing partner with Attila Dezső, the firm's founding partner. Outside his professional life, Polauf has been engaged in various sports activities since he was six, and continues to spend almost all of his free time outdoors (doing cross-country running and mountain biking). While Polauf says management duties have grown due to COVID, he is still trying to realise an old dream of completing every section of a 1,000 km hiking trail that winds its way through the mountains of Hungary. OF WHICH ACHIEVEMENTS ARE YOU MOST PROUD? I have had many achievements that I can be proud of, but I also have many plans for the future. As somebody who was involved in sports at a fairly high level, I learned early that you had to be focused and work hard at all times if you wanted to be successful. In high school, I reached the final of a national competition in literature, and I was the member of the Hungarian national team and a national champion as a middle-distance runner. At university, as a member of the application orientation committee of the Faculty of Law at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), I helped hundreds of students prepare for their legal careers. The challenges continued after
graduation, both in my academic and legal career. In addition to studying in ELTE’s PhD program in law, I also gained admission to the philosophy program, while as graduate teaching assistant, I taught various legal and paralegal courses at ELTE and the law schools of the universities in Győr, Pécs and Miskolc. I spent most of my time as a trainee lawyer in the office of Gábor Tóth, the current chairman of the Budapest Bar Association, where I learned a lot about the legal profession.
My next great professional challenge came in 2008, when CERHA HEMPEL’s Vienna office requested me to establish and grow their local practice in Hungary.
Dezső and Partners, a law firm founded and led by Attila Dezső, joined CERHA HEMPEL’s network of law firms in 2010. As recognition of my work, I was admitted as a partner of the new entity within two years. The next challenge, and one of the greatest of my life, came in 2013, when Attila Dezső and his partners entrusted
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Name of law firm Cerha Hempel Dezső és Társai Ügyvédi Iroda
Name of associate non-Hungarian law firm or cooperation network Cerha Hempel Rechtsanwälte GmbH
Address 1011 Budapest, Fő utca 14–18.
Managing partners Attila Dezső, Tamás Polauf
In charge of position since 1998 / 2013
Year of Hungarian law firm's establishment 1998
No. of attorneys with license to practise in Hungary on Sept. 15, 2020 36
No. of partners of Hungarian law firm on Sept. 15, 2020 10
me to serve as their managing partner. I have been co-managing the firm with Attila for seven years now, working hard to preserve what the firm has built up over a period of 30 years while making sure that it successfully adapts to a quickly and constantly changing business and legal environment.
Unfortunately, due to my growing legal and management workload, I gradually had to give up teaching and most of my academic activities. So I was all the more delighted when a few years ago, after several years of concerted efforts, our private antitrust litigation handbook that I initiated and edited was published by Wolters Kluwer.
WHAT DREW YOU TO LAW AS A PROFESSION? In contrast with some families where the tradition of being a lawyer goes back several generations, nobody in my family had a law degree. So I cannot say that my family guided me to the profession. When I applied to university and also when I completed my studies, I was a hair’s breadth away from becoming a teacher or a lecturer. But when my life came to a turning point, I always chose the path that led to the legal profession and I do not have any regrets at all.
HOW DID YOU PICK YOUR LEGAL SPECIALTY AREA? In my career of almost 20 years, I have dealt with many areas of law. Often the circumstances dictated which area I had to focus on. But lately, I have been lucky enough to have the luxury of being able to pick what I really want to do. So, in the last six or seven years, besides the management of large projects that cover several of my preferred areas, I have started to concentrate on competition and intellectual property law. It was my dream to create a team within our office that would focus on these areas, which have a long tradition in the broader CERHA HEMPEL network. It turned out that the model I learned as a schoolboy worked, because thanks to several years of hard work by the members of the team (particularly Márton Kocsis) and the strong backing of Attila Dezső, we are now regarded as one of the best competition law practices in Hungary.
WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE TO IMPROVE THE LEGAL ENVIRONMENT IN HUNGARY? This could be the subject of a lengthy research paper. There was a time when, in a discussion with our partners within the network or in other international settings, I was proud to be a Hungarian lawyer because a new and modern legal concept or cutting-edge technology solution (such as the electronic management of corporate procedures) that was ahead of Western European standards had just been introduced. Unfortunately, the international reputation of Hungarian legal system seems to have suffered a setback recently. I hope that a new wave of positive developments will come soon.
