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Anca Vătășoiu | Your Agile Employment Lawyer celebrates its third anniversary on the business legal market.

The boutique law firm specialized in employment matters, Anca Vătășoiu | Your Agile Employment Lawyer celebrated, in October 2021, its third anniversary, being an important player on its legal business niche. 

The philosophy we chose to guide our path was and remains the transformation of the client’s experience in the relationship with the chosen lawyer. When it comes to the Human Resources filed, legal services cannot be reduced strictly to providing legal solutions, the actual involvement in the day-to-day life of the client organization being essential.

Inspired by the “Agile” IT concept, we have made it our goal to tackle all projects by following few simple, yet effective principles which enable great collaboration with our clients and enhance the success rate of the implemented solutions.

The experience of our first three years of activity has confirmed that the direct interaction with the stakeholders of the project, as well as an in-depth understanding of the client’s business are two key elements in building strategies and legal solutions customized and adequate for the real needs of the company.

We are equally convinced that the best results may be obtained through a close collaboration between the lawyer and the client. We enjoy each opportunity to be more than a simple external consultant delivering a legal solution, and to genuinely be part of the client’s team, to be partners and share a common purpose, namely, to build strategies that address as accurately as possible the actual needs of the organization.

Last but not least, when developing such strategies, it is crucial to remain open to change. We base our work on the assumption that at least part of the initial project coordinates are likely to shift along the way and we are, thus, at all times prepared to customize the strategy of the case in order to address any radical change of course and not be taken by surprise.

Flexibility and creativity have particularly helped us to rapidly adapt during the last year and a half and cope with the difficult conditions imposed by the pandemic. We succeeded in efficiently transferring online the entire communication with our clients, without altering the core of the human interactions. Quite the contrary, we may say that the pandemic has created a paradox: by imposing physical distancing, it generated a need of social closeness, and introduced a bond between professional relationships – compassion, the care for those around us.

We believe that this empathic component stands as a significant element in building a long-lasting relationship between the client and its lawyer. The success in developing legal solutions optimized to the client needs derives particularly from creating a trust-based relationship between the lawyer and the client, and the latter’s openness to reveal to the lawyer, at a more subtle, detailed level, the particularities of its legal needs.

It is worthy to be mentioned that the digital era and the evolution of the business environment have determined fundamental changes in the philosophy of employment relationships. The flexibility of labor is, essentially, an extremely wide concept, since it covers a whole range of layers important for the health of an organization. Firstly, we are referring to a new philosophy based on the freedom of movement generously enabled by the new technologies. We are all extremely mobile, we have at hand extraordinary tech solutions which allow us to work efficiently and not depend on an office. An important factor is the quota of the businesses that function this way and, thus, generate extremely flexible jobs. In this context, it is only natural that any potential employees aspire at a job that comes with mobility and helps them better balance their professional and personal life.

This trend was undisputedly accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which tested the limits of the employment relationships’ dynamics, and particularly those of the labor legislation. The latter proved to be, in part, anachronic or, at best, incomplete (even as regards telework), requiring relatively high levels of creativity from employers and legal specialists in order to adapt rigid legal mechanisms to novel and diverse cases.

These transformations have made the legal challenges triggered by the inevitable tensions between employers and employees become even more complex. The employees’ access to information lead to an increase of awareness of their legal rights and, implicitly, of their appetite to hire a specialized lawyer in order to solve their complaints or labor conflicts.

Consequently, the labor related caselaw is more and more diverse, and the courts of law are faced not only with the classical claims for abusive dismissals – which, in their turn have become more and more challenging – but also with significant claims for overtime compensation, discrimination and harassment damages, tort liability (employer or employee related), enforcement or, on the contrary, cancellation of non-compete clauses etc.

To conclude, we are of the opinion that the rapid transformations of the business environment will naturally trigger a realignment of the entire labor legislation package, a profound shift of philosophy of the legal mechanisms, and of the levers enabling the handling of the technicalities behind the evermore volatile relationships between employers and their employees.

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Mrs. Anca Vătășoiu, Founding Partner of the Employment specialized law practice Anca Vătășoiu | Your Agile Employment Lawyer, is a well reputed attorney with over 14 years of experience in Employment law gained in two of the top law firms of Romania. Anca Vatasoiu has been recognized, for two consecutive years, in 2017 and 2018, among the Employment Next Generation Lawyers by Legal 500.