22 Jul 2020

Gecić Law’s pandemic experience featured in the prestigious The Lawyer magazine

The prestigious magazine The Lawyer featured a story about the experiences of Gecić Law’s team during the pandemic.  The article is part of their “Virus Diaries” series which covers experiences of big law firms across the globe in their struggle to keep their business afloat, clients satisfied and their communities and staff safe in these unusual circumstances.  

After providing background on Serbia’s Corporate Law market, remarking that it is “still in its early years“ but that many millennials in senior positions are quickly bringing it in line with global standards, the article covered various innovative ways in which Gecić Law adapted to the new circumstances.  

The firm employed a novel approach to decide when and how its staff, who faced a variety of challenges while working remotely, will return to their usual workplace. Hristina Kosec, Gecić Law’s COO, revealed that the firm conducted regular polls among the staff about their readiness to work from the office which only re-opened it after the majority said they would be willing to return to their desks, while the opportunity to continue working from home was still provided.  

Another challenge was ensuring that the firm’s offices, located inside a pre-WWII neo-renaissance building located in the heart of Belgrade, which the article’s author Gabriella Kane describes in admiring detail, were upgraded to minimise infection risk for staff.  Hristina outlined all the initiatives the firm undertook in ensuring smooth and safe work during the pandemic: from getting the IT systems up to speed to ensure easy work from home to ensuring that the office ACs, much needed during Belgrade’s hot summers, are safe for use once the staff returned to the office. 

However, as Bogdan Gecić, the firm’s founder remarked in the article, and as the whole „Virus Diaries“ series attests, on some occasions the pandemic ironically brought the world a little closer. In Gecić Law’s case, as noted in the article, it was through taking part in a TerraLex Virtual Global Meeting that brought over 600 leading legal professionals from across the world to discuss business opportunities and the pandemic. 

We are pleased that the story about our experiences and innovative ways of work will be read across the globe. We hope that it will not only inspire the readership of The Lawyer magazine to make their business more pandemic-proof but that it will also draw their attention to many opportunities offered in Serbia and its vibrant legal market.  

Special thanks to Gabriella Kane, the author of the article The Virus Diaries: Managing a law firm as crisis escalates in Serbia. You can find the full article in pdf in the upper left part of the window.