As air raid sirens wail, our Kyiv team rushes to the office bomb shelter five or six times a day. Recently, one of our lawyers – parking for a client meeting – was close enough to a strike that the blast lifted her car off the road. Another's apartment windows were blown out.
This is what managing a law firm in Kyiv looks like on the ground today.
I came to Ukraine in the early 1990s, drawn by the promise of independence and to work on one of its first sovereign transactions, the printing of Ukraine’s national currency, the hryvnia. What followed was three decades of moving between government and private practice – two stints as chief of staff to Ukraine's Minister of Justice, and adviser to two prime ministers, as well as leading the government’s foreign investment promotion agency.
I joined Kinstellar in 2020 and led the on-the-ground integration of the DLA Piper Ukraine office we had acquired in June 2021, nine months before the full-scale invasion. In February 2022, almost overnight, our office of almost one hundred people went from a near-full pipeline to virtually no new work. Our firm stood by its people, helping staff to relocate, and continuing to pay employees, including mobilised colleagues. I joined the Territorial Defence Forces, the reserve branch of Ukraine’s military, and defended Kyiv and my home. Like the rest of the country, the office pulled together. After a wrenching restructuring, we broke-even by the end of 2022, made an operating profit in 2024, and in 2025 we were solidly in the black.
How did we achieve this result? Most outside observers assumed the war would put Ukraine's legal market on hold, leaving its more than 72,000 practising lawyers with little to do. But the conflict did not freeze legal activity – it transformed it. Development finance institutions such as the US International Development Finance Corporation, the EBRD, Nordic development agencies and Agence Française de Développement have continued to back companies in the energy, agribusiness and infrastructure sectors. At the same time, a distinct new sector of legal work has emerged from Ukraine's front line, one that barely existed before the full-scale invasion: defence and military technology, known as defencetech or miltech.
This sector is now a key economic driver and is reshaping what it means to serve clients in Ukraine’s conflict environment. Indeed, it now represents over half of our Kyiv office's revenues. It cuts across all our practice areas – beyond corporate and joint venture structuring and commercial contracting, our employment law practice has undergone a dramatic transformation, as defence sector clients seek the benefits of critical-industry status and apply to reserve key employees from mobilisation.
We follow the rapidly evolving procurement frameworks, export control requirements and IP protections – well-established, but increasingly out-dated issues in more mature defence markets. As lawyers, we are not just applying established doctrine to new facts, we are helping create the doctrine itself, in real time, under conditions of active conflict.
The rapid pace of change has impacted our client profile as well. Our first prime contractor mandate was for a major German defence manufacturer in 2022. It concluded in record time, establishing the office as a reference point for other international primes entering Ukraine. We now also act for a range of international and Ukrainian miltech companies, including developers of drone and unmanned systems hardware and software. We help them secure export licences for technical data and equipment, and structure relationships with military end-users so products can be tested and proven under operational battlefield conditions.
The market has now evolved to the point where many of our Ukrainian defence company clients that were start-ups in 2023 now generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Their principal challenge is scale rather than technology or funding. Producing at volume domestically carries obvious vulnerabilities, so many are now establishing production capacity abroad. Government buyers are interested in purchasing capability sets – integrated ISR, land and maritime systems, strike and counter-drone capabilities – rather than individual products. That is driving consolidation among Ukrainian companies, as well as fuelling acquisition by international counterparts. Supporting that M&A activity has become an increasingly significant part of our corporate practice. My military and Ukrainian government experience helps clients navigate the rocky shoals of the Ukrainian government decision-making process, particularly with respect to negotiating with defence procurement bodies or advising on regulatory relationships.
For anyone watching where international legal services are heading, Ukraine is more than a risk to be managed. Billions of dollars will flow into rebuilding its transport, agribusiness and energy infrastructure once the war ends. Given Russia’s expansionist ambitions, Ukraine’s defence sector is likely to remain the epicentre of technological, economic and security change in Europe for years to come.
The Ukrainian legal profession has come through the harshest conditions it has ever faced. Our team in Kyiv intends to put that resilience to work for our clients today and in the future.
Daniel Bilak is managing partner of the Kyiv office at European firm Kinstellar.
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