For Richard Walawender, all roads lead back to Eastern Europe

Richard Walawender’s life and career have been shaped by his Polish roots. It started with his involvement in the Solidarity movement of the 1980s, which led to helping establish one of the rst private commercial banks in Poland as a young lawyer. Now, 62-year-old Walawender — attorney and principal at Miller Can eld Paddock and Stone PLC — plays a central role in the rm’s practice in Europe, including its new o ce in Ukraine where planning is underway to rebuild the war-torn country. The following conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

BY | KURT NAGL

 How did you get into law?

I didn’t decide on going to law school until after I graduated from undergrad and then was going to go into academia. But that wasn’t really exciting enough, so that’s when I applied to law school. Went to Michigan Law School and then joined Miller Can eldin ’86. I originally started doing nance work, public nance, mostly. My earlier interest was actually in sort of Central Europe and Poland. My parents are from Poland. I speak Polish. And when I was an undergrad, I spent a year in Krakow.

 How did your time there shape your career?

At that time, what was going on was the Solidarity trade union was having strikes and protests and work stoppages and marches against the government. And when I was over there, I really got involved with them. And then I came home and nished law school. The government clamped down in late ’81 and declared martial law and arrested all these Solidarity leaders, so I just went on with my life and my practice.

Then in 1989, the Solidarity took over the reins of government in Poland, the rst noncommunist government for two years, and I got a call from some of them that I knew before. They asked me to start helping them out on certain projects, and that’s when I kind of took the plunge. So we ended up doing a lot of work setting up U.S. companies in Poland, and so that’s when my practice focus changed.

 What has been the most exciting case or project you worked on in your career?

Setting up a bank in Poland. This was like in the early ’90s. There were no private banks in the country. It was all government-owned banks. So, when we started setting it up, one task was to nd investors willing to put in the capital. It was like $10 million was the minimum

Rumblings

amount of capital. So I ended up nding a group of investors out of the East Coast willing to put it up and did a joint venture with Solidarity and set up the Solidarity Bank.

 How did that work?

What was interesting about that process was in setting up the bank, looking at the bank code in Poland, which actually they did have one even though nobody ever looked at it, because it was kind of meaningless. So there was a small section in the bank code on applying to set up a bank. And it really just says, here’s the application, you know, you need to identify the name of the bank, the capital amount, owners and a few other things. And I mean, literally, you could t all of that on one page. That was kind of strange to even me being a young lawyer with no experience in this, let alone in Poland, but then again, no one else had any experience in Poland. We put this robust plan together and walked into this appointment with the National Bank of Poland to submit the application and were greeted by the president of the National Bank of Poland, which is sort of like their equivalent of the chairman of the Fed over here. We submitted this application, put it on the table, had a short meeting … And we became a little template for the National Bank of Poland on how to examine and review applications for new banks.

 You are the honorary consul general of Poland in Detroit. What does that job entail?

I can advocate on behalf of the Polish government, but also involved mainly in handling immigration issues for people here. The general consul of Poland is in Chicago, and so they’re the foreign service employees actually doing all the paperwork. But when there’s dignitaries, the Polish government coming in, you know, I assist them in organizing meetings with Michigan o cials or federal o cials, and also economic cooperation between the two countries is something else that I promote in that position.

 What are the strongest business ties between Michigan and Poland?

It’s probably still automotive. There’s a lot of U.S. companies and suppliers in Poland. But there’s also quite a bit of interaction in the IT sector as well, computer science software. That’s a pretty popular sector in Poland, which U.S. companies take a lot of advantage of, especially in the automotive area where now everything is controlled by software.

 What big projects are you involved in now?

In addition to the United States, you might know that Poland’s a big, big advocate and supporter of Ukraine in this war with Russia. There’s 3.5 million refugees — Ukrainians — that came into Poland. We made a decision a few months ago to a liate with a Ukrainian lawyer. Her name is Olena (Shtohryn), and she’s a young lawyer from Kiev. One of their major clients back in Ukraine was the Ukrainian Construction Association, which represents all the major probably a trillion dollars’ crainsdetroit.com

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Rick Walawender is an attorney and principal at Miller Can eld Paddock and Stone PLC.