Austrian firm Schoenherr has made its first equity promotions outside of its Vienna base, making up five partners across its network of international offices.

The appointments in Prague, Bucharest and Belgrade make Schoenherr one of the first Austrian firms to admit lawyers to the equity outside Austria.

Prague corporate partner Martin Kubanek and competition partner Martin Nedelka will join the equity retroactively from February 2010. Meanwhile, Bucharest managing partner Sebastian Gutiu and Belgrade M&A partners Slaven Moravcevic and Matija Vojnovic will join the equity partnership with effect from February 2011.

Schoenherr managing partner Christoph Lindinger (pictured) said: "We have decided to take this step because we are a firm working in many different jurisdictions with different market environments so we wanted to ensure that equal importance was placed on our partners across all of our offices.

"As we become increasingly international, we must move away from our country of origin as the dominating region and ensure that all of our offices are on equal footing. We are definitely intending to open up more equity slots in the partnership."

The new equity partners, all of whom were previously salaried partners with the firm, will take the number of equity partners at Schoenherr from 18 to 23. In total the firm has 52 partners across 12 offices.

Schoenherr operates a 13-tier equity lockstep and this year introduced an additional bonus pool, which is distributed to equity partners at the end of a year. The level of the bonus is decided annually by a strategy committee.