2020 was a year of continued growth and expansion for CERHA HEMPEL’s Competition Group. After leading the compliance department of the MOL Group for a year, Márton Kocsis re-joined our team in the spring and took over the management of the Competition Group, and now he has led and developed the practice together with partner Tamás Polauf for a total of six years.
It’s quite an achievement that they had to expand the group only after another six months.
Boglárka Priskin joined our team on 10 November 2020. Before that she worked at the Hungarian Competition Authority for 11 years, where she first started as an investigator. She worked as a Deputy Head of Department from September 2014, and as a Head of Department from 2019. During her time at the Hungarian Competition Authority, Boglárka gained in-depth experience in the fields of competition law, consumer protection law and administrational law. In her last position at the Authority, Boglárka was in charge of a 10-member team of experts and administrative staff that supports the Competition Council, i.e. the Hungarian Competition Authority’s arbitration board. As the leader of the team, she assisted the president and members of the Council, participated in the transposition of the new ECN Plus Directive into Hungarian national legislation, and she gave numerous presentations in Hungariaan and international conferences.
She contributed to the drafting and revision of Competition Authority’s communiqués and information bulletins, worked on joint projects with the OECD and the European Commission, and participated in the coordination of numerous organisation-wide development projects and programmes. Before becoming a Deputy Head of Department in 2014, Boglárka worked as an investigator and drafted preliminary positions and second-instance decisions for the members of the arbitration board. Between 2009 and September 2012, she was an investigator within the consumer protection department, and in this position she participated in a large number of investigations concerning the financial and transportation markets. Before joining the HCA, Boglárka interned at the competition law practice of an international law firm in Brussels. While studying law at the Law School of the University of Pécs, Boglárka received an Erasmus grant and took classes in European and competition law at the University of Tilburg for one semester.
Anna Pintér became a member of our team at CERHA HEMPEL in December 2020, after graduating from the Faculty of Law of Eötvös Loránd University. She received an Erasmus Scholarship, giving her the opportunity to enrol at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where she continued her legal studies in English for two semesters, taking classes in competition law, international intellectual property law and data protection law.
During her university years, Anna was an enthusiastic member of a College for Advanced Studies, where she and her fellow students participated in several extra-curricular civil law classes and mastered the vocabulary of legal English. She completed her compulsory internship at an international law firm and wrote her final thesis on the topic of the liability of online intermediary service providers.
Last, but not least, Júlia Bokor joined our Competition Group in January 2021. Júlia finished her studies at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of Pázmány Péter Catholic University in 2020. During her years at university, competition law was her main interest, and she was a member of the university’s Competition Law Research Centre. In addition to her university studies, she worked as an intern at two international law firms. In the course of her studies, Júlia competed in contests organised under the auspices of the Scientific Student Conference and the National Scientific Student Conference.
From the autumn of 2017, she spent one year in France, where she was a student of the Université de Versailles within the Erasmus Scholarship programme. She speaks excellent English and is currently working on improving her French.
The significant expansion of our team was made possible by the increase in the number of clients and the dynamic growth in the cases we have and handle. We would like to thank our clients for their trust that gave us the opportunity to put together a team that is second to none in Hungary (even if the team is rarely together in our offices these days and its members mostly stay in touch virtually). CERHA HEMPEL’s Competition Group, with its four lawyers (our team’s fourth senior lawyer is Márton Osztheimer, who has more than 15 years of experience as an international lawyer and provides legal services to our clients both in English and German) and its two junior associates is not only the most ambitious team on the market but also one of the largest. We can proudly say that our team is unique both in terms of the combined knowledge and the individual professional experience of its members: in includes experienced international lawyers, a former corporate chief counsel and a former investigator (leader in fact) of the Competition Authority, as well as associates whose youthful energy is a valuable addition to our team. We hope we can welcome you as one of our clients one day!
Tamás Polauf & Márton Kocsis
