Reputation in Central and Eastern Europe used to be something firms cultivated through good work and word of mouth. Today, it has quietly morphed into something more structural: a risk indicator. Foreign clients, investors, banks, and multinational GCs, have begun treating a firm’s public footprint the way they treat KYB/KYC information. They check for clarity, consistency, and external validation long before they send an email.
CEE firms rarely see this process unfold, but it shapes the market every day.
How foreign clients actually form first impressions
When a cross-border client looks for local counsel, they don’t start with intuition. They start with what can be verified. A partner’s digital presence becomes the first layer of due diligence:
Are they listed in global directories? Chambers Global 2024, for example, ranks only 2–6 firms per practice in many smaller CEE jurisdictions, and Legal500 often names fewer than 15 individual lawyers per country across all tiers. For international clients, the absence is not taken as proof of irrelevance, but it does complicate the risk assessment.
Deal teams also look for signals that appear almost incidental, such as mentions in Mergermarket or LSEG Data & Analytics (formerly Refinitiv) deals, past representation in IFC or EBRD projects, participation in ABA or IBA committees, or authorship in respected publications. Each of these leaves a small trace of credibility in the world, and together, they form a map of trust.
It is not that clients distrust a firm without these signals. It’s that they cannot immediately confirm what the firm claims to be. And in cross-border work, uncertainty is expensive.
Why a digital footprint became an evidentiary layer
In the last three years, corporate legal departments have changed their behaviour. Bloomberg Law’s 2023 report shows that 73% of clients research lawyers online before contacting them. Thomson Reuters’ 2024 GC study adds that reputation and demonstrable expertise remain the top factors in outside counsel selection.
This means that a lawyer’s biography, writing, visibility, and digital traceability now function as indicators of reliability. Not as marketing.
A clear, well-documented public profile suggests:
- The lawyer communicates clearly under pressure.
- The firm has systems, not just good intentions.
- The team is actively engaged in international work.
- Expertise is stable and not dependent on anecdote.
Foreign clients read all of this, sometimes unconsciously, from the way a firm shows up online.
The inverse is also true: gaps, inconsistencies, outdated profiles or thin digital presence trigger the same instinct as missing documentation in a compliance file. Not rejection. Just hesitation. And in competitive markets, hesitation is enough to shift a mandate elsewhere.
Where reputational leakage quietly occurs
Most CEE firms don’t lose work because of dramatic failures. They lose it in the quiet spaces between visible signals.
A firm that hasn’t been cited in cross-border matters for several years appears less active. A partner whose profile hasn’t been updated since 2019 feels disconnected from present-day regulation. A firm with no mention in industry media looks harder to position inside a multinational’s risk framework.
Clients rarely tell firms this. They may not even consciously think it in these words. It’s just a gut feeling, and they simply choose someone else.
This is why international work often concentrates around a small number of familiar names. They are not always objectively “better,” but they are verifiable. They appear in Chambers or IFLR1000. They show up in conferences, are cited by peers, contribute to regional reports, or are visible in LSEG deal data.
These are not marketing gestures; they are the infrastructure of trust.
The new reality: reputation behaves like compliance
CEE law firms increasingly operate in a world where:
- Visibility becomes traceability,
- Consistency becomes predictability, and
- External validation becomes proof of safety.
None of this requires self-promotion or aggressive branding. It requires coherence: a public presence that matches the firm’s real expertise and helps foreign clients complete their internal risk checks without friction.
The shift is subtle but decisive. Clients no longer ask only: “Are they good?” They ask: “Can I justify choosing them?”
In this new reputation economy, the firms that understand how global clients think, not just how they buy, will be the ones that attract the most complex and consequential cross-border work in the years ahead.
By Adriana Arnaut, Founder, LegaVoice
