For two days in mid-February, as government troops attacked demonstrators in Kiev’s Independence Square, Dentons corporate partner Myron Rabij, his wife and two young daughters holed up in their apartment overlooking the square, praying the flames below wouldn’t spread. Like many in his 30-lawyer office, Rabij, an American of Ukrainian descent, had marched alongside pro-Western protestors until the demonstrations turned violent. After the worst night, Feb. 20, Rabij went out to help medical crews carry stretchers. “It’s been very stressful,” he says in an understatement.
It has been quiet at the office, though. Amid the political upheaval and fears of a Russian invasion that followed the February protests, work has dried up for Dentons and other firms in Kiev, lawyers say. “Transactional work is completely dead. Law firms are barely surviving. There are no new clients,” says Alex Frishberg, a Ukraine-born American lawyer who left Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells) in 1991 to open up the first foreign registered law office in Kiev. But Rabij and other law firm leaders are taking a wait-and-see approach, pinning their hopes on a potential uptick in Western investment.
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