David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, recently sat down with Maria Orlyk, managing partner of CMS Reich-Rohrwig Hainz’s Kyiv office, about continuing legal operations in the lead up to and aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
David B. Wilkins: I’d like to start with a little bit about your background. Could you talk about your career and practice, and how you ended up as the head of CMS Reich-Rohrwig Hainz’s Kyiv office?
Maria Orlyk: It was a New York job fair! It’s weird to say, but my experience in the United States brought me to CMS. I am, first of all, a Ukraine-trained lawyer. I graduated from the Institute of International Relations of Taras Shevchenko National University and was working in one of the top law firms in Ukraine. But I wanted to continue my studies, so I applied for—and received—a scholarship from the Edmund Muskie Program to get an LL.M. at Wake Forest University in 2005 and 2006. And there, without any plans, somebody told me, “We should go and check out the New York job fair.” So we went!
Read the interview at
