You're reading: Top Lawyers: Oleg Makarov

Oleg Makarov - Vasil Kisil and Partners

Managing partner
4 points

Oleg Makarov has been a partner with Vasil Kisil since the establishment of the company in 1992, and when its founder, Vasil Kisil, decided to quit active practice in 2007, he became the firm’s managing partner.

For the last 20 years, Makarov has been a litigation lawyer, mainly specializing in cases dealing with taxation, property and corporate law.

Amazingly, being a regular in Ukraine’s courtrooms, Makarov seems to have very little to complain about, when it comes to the country’s notoriously non-transparent judiciary. It seems that he has learned the tricks of the trade so well that he seems to feel at home even in the most hostile of courtroom surroundings.

As Makarov explains, gone are the times when individual lawyers would win cases only through their eloquence in presenting their argument. Nowadays, he says, the cases are simply too complex to be handled by individual star lawyers with great charisma. Instead, many require the input of entire legal teams.

The team’s ability to think logically, get into the smallest details of every case they work on and foresee the way things will develop in court seems to be Makarov’s recipe for success.

Interestingly, Makarov categorically discounts the old cliché of comparing a legal case with a game of chess. For him, this analogy is just way too narrow to be accurate.

“When you have an opportunity to make a check, you don’t always make a check,” Makarov says. “Your task is to win, not just to make an offense advance.”