Our data protection expert, Endre Várady, wrote the Hungarian chapter of Chambers Data Protection & Privacy guide. It contains everything you need to know about data protection in Hungary, be it data security, data management, data transfer, data localization, and more.

Endre recommends the publication to anyone who wants to quickly and thoroughly learn about Hungarian data protection.

The publication can be read by clicking here.

This year started well for us, as Attila Menyhárd joined the VJT team. Attila is a true renaissance man: he creates law as a legislator, teaches law as an educator, and cultivates law as a lawyer, and thus sees through the fine fabric that connects the economy, society, and individual people with what we call law. Read more...

OneTrust, the famous US compliance software company, asked our firm to prepare the ‘Employment Note’ - the Hungarian chapter about employee data protection. This remains a core data protection field as employment, with its continuously evolving trends (including digitalisation), always involves new privacy challenges.

This is a very useful guide for those who want to find the right track among the jungle of various employment privacy questions. How can you collect data from the applicant? Can you make copies of employees’ records? How might employee data be transferred? How do you handle the data protection requirements concerning teleworking or ‘Bring your own Devices’ policies? Our chapter offers practical answers to these questions and many others.

For further information about this guide, please contact Endre Varady at varadye@vjt-partners.com.

The CEE Legal HUB BootCamp is an annual, 2-day event for the law firm network that advises Google in the CEE region. Our team was represented by our partners, János Tamás Varga and Endre Varady. Based on their feedback, it is obvious that they had a great time. The event began with a cocktail reception held on the 27th floor of the Atlas Tower where, in addition to delicious cocktails and tasty snacks, lawyers from many countries reconnected with old friends. This was followed by a series of high-quality lectures on future digital challenges as well as on very topical social issues, e.g. the situation of Ukrainian lawyers. At the dinner, the great social gathering continued and János and Endre did pretty well in the evening, too! The next day, they did not let their guard down, when, in workshops, the participants discussed how cooperation with Google’s central team could become even more optimal. BootCamp is always on our schedule for September and we are always keen to take part!

Thomson Reuters asked our firm to prepare the Hungarian chapter of their international Practical Law Global publication about data localisation. Our colleague, Endre Varady, answered the questions in the report which revealed interesting facts about the Hungarian territorial restrictions on data storage. For example, public bodies can only store data in Hungary on servers operated by a Hungarian company and similar rules apply to gambling companies.

VJT & Partners provided legal support to energy business software solutions provider Navitasoft and its owner in connection with Blue Planet Climate Protection Fund’s 3-round capital investment in a total amount of HUF 1.2 billion. According to the company and the investor, the investment will help them increasing the company’s financial flexibility and achieving new strategic goals while further boosting the transformation to a sustainable green future.

VJT & Partners’ team led by János Tamás Varga and András Lovretity, with two decades of transaction experience behind them, helped this company listed among the 50 most successful Hungarian businesses in 2021 and its owner to execute the investment. Congratulations!

We love Doing Business in Hungary because it is a common knowledge base that the entire team of VJT’s lawyers have been involved in creating. Colleagues working in various fields of law have contributed their best and most up-to-date knowledge to ensure that our existing and future foreign partners who start a business in Hungary have accurate and up-to-date information on the Hungarian regulatory and economic environment.

This publication is intended primarily for our clients and, bearing their needs in mind, we have written it in an easy-to-understand format, free from legal jargon. The publication is lengthy enough to answer all common questions and is clear so that everyone can immediately find the area and questions they are interested in, be it about company establishment, accounting, auditing, taxation, employment, intellectual property, data protection, and more.

Secondly, we wrote the publication for ourselves, as we updated and deepened our legal knowledge during the writing process. And last but not least, this knowledge base is for everyone who is looking for a great summary of the current economic and legal climate in Hungary.

The publication can be downloaded after registration here.

Every year, in the Legal 500 publication that ranks law firms, more and more excellent opinions are formed about our firm, and more and more of our colleagues are receiving recognition. As one of our clients describes our team, ‘No frills, but efficient, client-oriented, dedicated work’. This dedicated work is also reflected in our clients’ opinions, making VJT & Partners one of the best in Employment, Commercial, Corporate and M&A, Data protection and Technology, Telecom and Media (TMT), as well as getting excellent results in Competition and Dispute resolution.

‘They are great problem solvers!’ – Employment

We have been considered among the best in Employment for many years thanks to Tamás János Varga, who has been in the ‘Hall of Fame’ of Employment for several years, and Zoltán Csernus, who is a “Leading Individual” - always fighting for our clients’ best interests.

How long have you been working for VJT & Partners?

I joined the team in the autumn of 2021, shortly before taking the bar exam. I previously worked as an associate at international law firms.

What matters do you enjoy working on?

Primarily on international acquisitions, corporate restructuring and investment transactions. But I also feel at home when dealing with energy, commercial and employment matters.

Why do you like working here?

In addition to the outstanding professional standard of the work, the colleagues are honest, open and constructive when problem-solving. I also feel inspiring about the firm’s core values. They brought me in and give me a sense of belonging and community.

Do you have any hobbies?

I have a small house next to a fishing pond. When I am there, I fish - it allows me to completely relax. I also play sports regularly and more recently, I started gardening.

A large part of our lives is now dependent on the virtual space. For example, we handle our business and private matters online, we advertise online, we spend money online, and we sign contracts online. Simply put, we spend a considerable part of our lives in the online world. As more and more business is being transferred to the digital space, it has become extremely difficult to get a clear picture among a jungle of various regulations.

As the regular Hungarian adviser of one of the "Big Four" tech companies, VJT & Partners has taken on this challenge and prepared the Hungarian chapter of Lexology's Digital Business worldwide publication. Our chapter provides excellent legal guidance for those setting up or running a digital business in Hungary or even abroad. How can you conclude a contract electronically? How do you follow your users’ online habits? How do you protect your database? What should you pay attention to when advertising online? The publication answers these and many other practical digital questions.

Since the online world today seems to be borderless, online businesses know no borders either. Only we lawyers must find the borders, and race to keep up with the pace of rapidly changing digital regulations.

If you are interested in the guide, please contact our colleague, Endre Várady.
varadye@vjt-partners.com

Chambers’ publication, ranking European law firms, has praised our firm once again, highlighting our work in corporate M&A, Employment, and Technology & Media & Telecoms (TMT). Our firm’s clients gave excellent feedback about our lawyers’ experience, their approach to business, and the way they view cases as a whole embedded in the respective business and legal environments.

According to our clients, András Lovretity's ability to think practically is quite impressive. He does not overcomplicate things but instead, tries to solve issues as simply as possible. János Tamás Varga, who has a reputation for being an excellent strategic thinker, takes the lion's share of praise as regards supporting the decision-making process, and his creativity in working out deal structures is also noted.

Our clients consider our TMT team members not only to be legal advisers, but also business partners. Endre Várady has been called a business-friendly adviser who always strives for the perfect solution. He is excellently complemented by János Tamás Varga who is described by clients as a tough but flexible negotiator who is very good at seeing the big picture.

In the field of employment law, our clients are extremely satisfied and feel that everything that our team does serves their best interests. Taking centre stage here is Zoltán Csernus, who always provides accurate and detailed answers to any employment questions that arise.

This interview says it all. How was our firm built up around the all-pervasive and all-formative core values? What makes a good lawyer? Why is “work-life balance” or “home office” a challenge today? János Tamás Varga's unique thoughts on law, on our world and on the world of law were published in Budapest Business Journal’s Top Legal Executives 2022 issued recently.

Read the whole interview here.

Chambers and Partners, one of the most prestigious legal directories, has reissued its collection of world-class law firms. VJT & Partners continues to be, as it has been every year so far, ranked among the noteworthy firms.

Chambers Global highlights our extensive experience in venture capital investments in Hungarian companies and praises our work in acquisitions, asset deals, and corporate restructuring mandates.

Chambers Global has quoted our satisfied clients:

"We appreciate András Lovretity’s practical thinking. He does not overcomplicate things but rather tries to solve them as simply as possible."

János Tamás Varga is praised by a client "for his strategic thinking and for supporting the decision-making process and for his creativeness in working out deal structures".

VJT & Partners, as legal counsel, supported WTS Klient in the transaction, as a result of which financial investor ARX Equity Partners became the new majority owner of the company. Our colleagues, András Lovretity and his team used their many years of transactional experience to help the company to execute the investment. Congratulations!

The tax and financial advisory firm WTS Klient welcomes new majority owner following the successful transaction. According to the company’s press release, the new co-owner, Prague-based ARX Equity Partners, sees great potential for development in the Hungarian company and is confident that WTS Klient will move further up on the list of Hungary's leading tax and financial advisory companies.

According to the press release, the investment provides WTS Klient with significant prospect, and the company is certain that its new partner, with its clear growth strategy and solid financial background, will help the group to develop further.

Based on this years’ Legal500 evaluation and our clients’ opinions, we can say that we don’t just have three, but actually have more than a dozen “musketeers” protecting our clients’ interests.

First-class legal advice - Employment

We have been listed among the best in the field of employment law for many years now. Zoltán Csernus, the leader of our employment team, cannot be praised enough by our clients. He is practical and thorough; briefly speaking, he knows everything that an excellent lawyer needs to know.

This year’s Chambers Europe publication has again ranked law firms. In order to set the ranking for the law market in Europe, the staff at Chambers Europe asked our colleagues about professional issues and quizzed our clients about our work. Thank you for your appreciation!

Chambers has surveyed the law market in Europe and compiled a list of the best law firms. The ranking is still based on the opinions of clients and market participants. Our office has lived up to its own expectations, with excellent positions in the areas of M&A, Employment and Technology practice.

Chambers Global is visited by those who are looking for a high-quality law firm in a foreign country or simply curious about who are the best lawyers in a specific country. The publication ranks law firms annually based on client reviews and interviews. Once again, we came out of this year's competition with excellent results: our office is among the leading law firms in Hungary in the field of corporate acquisitions and capital investment transactions, both in terms of expertise and clientele.

Our clients especially emphasized our Corporate and M&A team leader András Lovretity’s high level of expertise, and his dedicated attention to detail. According to client opinions, András not only accurately understands their questions, but also gives clear, perfectly understandable answers.

Our managing partner, János Tamás Varga, is known as a professional expert among our clients. In his legal advice, expertise is combined with practical solutions. Tamás is the highest rated specialist among the lawyers of independent Hungarian law firms.

As a top tier specialised data protection law firm in Hungary, VJT & Partners is pleased to have been selected to contribute to Data Protection & Privacy 2021, as one the very important series of Chambers Global Practice Guide.

This guide features more than 20 jurisdictions and provides the latest legal information on various hot topics including online marketing, workplace privacy, access to data for national security purposes, international data transfers, data localisation requirements, and emerging digital and technology issues.

VJT & Partners prepared the Hungarian chapter of this guide, which provides a first-hand insight into the Hungarian implementation of GDPR and how the Hungarian Data Protection Authority approaches various data protection issues.

For details about our firms’ established data protection practice, please see https://www.vjt-partners.com/data-protection.html.

VJT & Partners’ compliance team is proud to announce its new membership at TRACE, a global leader in anti-bribery compliance solutions.

TRACE provides unparalleled global resources (such as guidebooks, model anti-bribery polices, and risk assessment tools), a customizable training platform and due diligence support. TRACE provides this anti-bribery compliance support primarily for Fortune 500 companies located worldwide, representing every industry.

TRACE has more than 140 partner law firms with exceptional experience in and knowledge of anti-bribery laws and related compliance matters.

Our partnership with TRACE is an exceptional opportunity to grow as a thought-leader in compliance fields.

Endre Várady, our partner participated in the Global Leaders Forum (GLF) this year for the second time, where leading independent firms dealing with technology were represented around the globe.

Endre was the co-moderator of the online round table “Social Media – Platforms and content”. Endre discussed with participants how platform liability evolved, as well as the outlook of future platform content regulations. Can platforms still defend themselves that they are just hosts with passive, technical and neutral roles after the recent ban of Trump from social media? Shall platform content be similarly regulated as traditional media? These are some of the hot topics discussed – as well as countless others.

“As a lawyer who regularly advises a Big Four Tech company, I was very happy to hear personal experience and international views on this constantly evolving law. It was interesting to see that despite jurisdictional differences, very similar issues arise in different countries. I think such roundtables are always good to widen our horizons and to develop new ideas. It is real food for thought. Both the networking opportunity and professional development at GLF are worth the time and effort” said Endre Várady. “GLF is a true go-to place.”

VJT & Partners is pleased to have been selected as a partner of EMEA Elite, the Legal500’s inaugural special edition.

EMEA Elite provides the global audience with local insight of elite firms from a wide variety of markets across the EMEA region. It also offers an inside track on what makes the world of elite law firms so successful and how they managed to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Q&A form provides the readers with a few snapshots of various EMEA markets in an easy-to-understand and digestible format.

János Tamás Varga, our managing partner explains the major developments in the Hungarian legal market, and how COVID-19 is impacting it, plus key future trends to watch. You may read the interview here.

We hope you enjoy it.

Most of us know Hoa Nguyen well, as she has spent part of her years as an associate at VJT & Partners. Now she joined us again as a counsel and brought along the delicate and kind atmosphere that has always surrounded her.

In her work, she is responsible and purposeful. She likes to delve into matters and explore them to the smallest detail. She is a collaborative, open and helpful colleague.

In addition to M&A, Hoa has also dealt with general commercial contracts and provided advice in the pharmaceutical sector. She worked as a volunteer in the field of children’s rights.

Hoa graduated from the Faculty of Law of Eötvös Loránd University. She is fluent in English .

Her areas of expertise in our firm will be M&A, private equity, employment, and commercial contracts.

We have been searching for a long time for the appropriate colleague to add to our employment law team, and we finally found her! Krisztina has been working as a lawyer for more than 20 years, and her last 10 years have been spent in the field of employment law.

In addition to being an experienced lawyer, Krisztina fits in perfectly with our team. With her open and kind personality, she quickly integrated into us, and we soon fell in love with her determination, her concise sayings , and her reliability.

As a true lawyer, the most important thing is for her to protect the interests of clients to the maximum and, to this end, to find all existing legal solutions. In addition to employment law, she has extensive experience in litigation and commercial contracts.

Krisztina graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Miskolc and then she obtained a degree in European law from Eötvös Loránd University.

She is fluent in English, French and German.

Krisztina specializes in employment law, dispute resolution, commercial contracts, and real estate law.

TLDR:

• The EU Commission has drafted its White Paper on Artificial Intelligence (“AI White Paper”) to tackle a wide variety of legal issues in the context of artificial intelligence (“AI”).
• As AI slowly, but surely will surround us, it is worth keeping a close eye on legislative developments in this area. AI potentially could be a hotter legal topic than the GDPR.

In the world of data economy and algorithms, AI has increasingly become more and more intertwined in our everyday lives. Its business benefits are countless. Of course, at the same time, AI poses several legal issues including opaque decision-making (the black-box effect), discrimination (based on incorrect machine learning), privacy, safety, and liability issues. Recognizing these concerns, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, noted “with new technologies should not come new values. This is the basic idea: to have the best possible tools, to use them in the best possible way, but to stay loyal to the fundamentals that have brought us here”. This view was the keystone of the Political Guidelines for the next European Commission 2019-2024, and as its first step, the EU Commission prepared the AI White Paper to create an ecosystem of trust for AI operation in the EU.

In the first wave of COVID-19, the general application of temperature screening for all employees was considered excessive. But now with the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the light of current community-wide and massive number of infections, the Hungarian data protection authority (DPA) revised its former opinion and made temperature screening a more flexible and accessible tool for employers.

VJT & Partners has collected the key issues employers need to keep in mind when carrying out temperature screening.

Read the whole article...

We congratulated Emőke on becoming a counsel with a big celebration associated with a bowling party.

Emőke has been working with us since 2017. We have been pleased to follow her progress from associate to counsel. Easily and lovingly connected to us and our clients, her serene temperament brought a cheerful breeze to our firm.

She is enthusiastic and determined in her work, her attention is always on the clients. She has a good overview and management of complex transactions with diverse documentation and over the years has become an expert in corporate law issues.

She is open and sociable, present with heart and hand at the cultural events of our firm.

Legal 500’s publication appraising law firms is like the Michelin guide for restaurants. It ranks offices, shows the strengths of the firms, highlights significant personalities, and shares customer feedback with the reader. Here’s a bunch of reviews of this year’s Legal500 ranking.

VJT & Partners is absolutely at the top of Employment Law! VJT’s managing partner, János Tamás Varga, received the highest recognition given by the publication and was included in the Hall of Fame. It’s like being in the company of the best master chefs. János Tamás, who, for decades, has only received praise from clients, has joined the team of the most recommended lawyers in recognition of his high-quality, excellent work. The publication highlights the leader of our employment law team, Zoltán Csernus, as a “Leading Individual”. Our office is also among the first to be recommended in this area, so we can say that we are absolutely at the top in terms of employment law!

Eszter took the oath of attorney a few days ago, therefore the VJT team lost an associate, but gained a lawyer!

Eszter started working for us before graduation, and her enthusiasm has been unbroken ever since. During her junior years, all the lawyers in the office were happy to work with her because she is not only reliable and conscientious, but always strives for perfection in her work.

Eszter's work is praised not only by lawyers but also by clients, because with her natural kindness and commitment she has helped many of our clients settle difficult situations. One of her most important skills is cooperation, which is also a cornerstone of our office.

Eszter will work in the areas of insurance law, commercial contracts and real estate law.

Congratulation!