Though Jim Hitch has spent a lifetime preparing to work and live in Eastern Europe, he isn't among the group of expatriates who say they plan to live here permanently. After more than a handful of winters in Kyiv, Moscow and St. Petersburg, the lawyer has his gaze set on eventually teaching law in the substantially more hospitable climate of southern California.
That's not to say he's packed his bags, though. There are at least a few more Kyivan winters in the 55-year old lawyer's immediate future.
Hitch is managing partner in charge of Baker & McKenzie's Kyiv office, one of 68 such outposts scattered around the globe. He doesn't describe Baker & McKenzie as an American law firm with offices throughout the world. He prefers to describe it as an international law firm that just happens to be headquartered in the United States.
Most might say that sounds like splitting hairs - the kind of linguistic precision for which lawyers are known. Yet Hitch's viewpoint is defensible: Each of the 38 countries in which the firm has a presence has different laws, different legal systems and different cultures and customs. A fast-food restaurant may be able to produce an identical sandwich in Singapore and Seattle, but legal advice just doesn't work that way.
The firm's Kyiv office, which includes four partners, 15 associates, six paralegals and about 20 clerical and support staff, will add four new lawyers in September. Besides Hitch, American Petro Matiascek is the only other expat on staff. Hitch says that while most of the staff speaks English and Russian, Ukrainian is the office's official language.
When he does leave for a beach house in San Diego, it's likely that the next managing partner will be a Ukrainian, he said. More and more, offices of international firms that are headed by expatriates are becoming anomalies, he said. Of the firm's 19 partners in CIS countries, Hitch said only seven are expats. Globally, the firm prefers to see local partners in leadership positions.
Hitch's path to Kyiv began when he was a student in an Illinois high school run by Jesuits. In addition to Latin, he was faced with choosing a foreign language.
"Anyone could take Spanish, and French was for girls," he says. "So I took Russian."
He went on to spend the summer of 1970 in Leningrad, and was soon hooked on the language and the culture of the region. After being graduated from Princeton in 1971, he obtained an IREX scholarship to study law at Harvard. His legal education was interrupted when after two years, he took a year off to study arbitration law in Zagreb, where he added a new language - Croatian - before returning to finish law school in 1975.
With his language skills, knowledge of Eastern Europe and arbitration experience, Hitch started an East-West trade practice for Baker & McKemzie in its flagship Chicago office. He came to Kyiv in 2002 from the firm's St. Petersburg office, where he had been managing partner since 1997.
Hitch said that 80 percent of the office's clients are foreign companies that want to ensure that they aren't violating Ukrainian laws. That expectation isn't as easy to comply with as it seems, given the country's often poorly drafted and intentionally vague statutes and a judiciary that is widely believed to be open to political and financial influence.
Though at times frustrating, Hitch says that cases take longer to decide in Ukraine, but that the quality of justice is better from the higher courts, which he says operate more transparently and have more integrity.
He said that the country could improve its laws if there was more cooperation between parliament and the president, adding that there are too many vested interests in parliament, where deputies routinely vote on bills that will impact their own businesses and personal fortunes - an activity that is forbidden elsewhere.
"Ukraine needs to adopt conflict of interest legislation," he said.
He does give the government credit for having passed competition laws such as the European Union's model intellectual property law, but noted that while the law looks good on the books, enforcement efforts are still spotty.
Among the laws that Ukraine still needs: legislation on fraudulent conveyances and a centralized land title registration act. There is also still no law on joint stock corporations, he said, leaving this business activity to be governed by the civil code. He also urged parliament to adopt shareholders' rights legislation, but acknowledged that powerful business interests that fear losing control of their companies would oppose such laws.
The prospect of membership in the European Union and World Trade Organization can force Ukraine "to have the will to change," he said, adding that presently "European Integration is only a slogan."
In many ways, he said, Ukraine may be better off outside the European Union due to the higher wages that member countries pay.
Hitch can't exert much influence on parliament, though, so his time is spent on things he can influence, like his office's Ukrainian attorneys. Hitch says he bills clients for only about four hours during a 12-hour workday. Much of the rest of the time is spent, he says, "training lawyers to think like businesspeople."
Law schools do a good job of teaching law, Hitch said, but lawyers are more likely to learn business and management skills on the job. He says that he tries to help lawyers to be proactive and to take on responsibility.
That's when he becomes a teacher, honing the skills he hopes to someday use on university students in sunny California.
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