Tuca Zbarcea & Co in talks for absorption of ten-lawyer firm

Tuca Zbarcea & Asociatii law firm, one of the leading players on the market, is currently in talks to take over a small firm of 10-12 lawyers, as well as with a group of lawyers that broke away from another firm on the market.

"We have expanded our offices to the seventh floor of the building (the company is headquartered on the eighth floor of the America House in Piata Victoriei), where we rented 500 square metres, so that we can now accommodate 100 lawyers. Good people are hard to find on the market now, but we are discussing a potential merger with two groups of lawyers," stated Gabriel Zbarcea, one of the two managing partners of the firm. As for breakaways, consolidations and entries of new companies this year has been extremely busy on the law firm market, with new names appearing such as White & Case, Allen & Overy, Garrigues and Peli Filip.
Tuca Zbarcea currently has 15 partners and approximately 70 lawyers, and derived 11.38 million euros in revenues last year, while profit stood at 7.1 million euros, which makes the company one of the top three players on the market by turnover. "We can say we are on schedule for 20% growth in turnover, as we said at the beginning of the year," Zbarcea says. Achieving this target would entail almost 14 million-euro business for the company established just three years ago.
Some of the most important contracts the firm was involved in this year are assisting BCR, BRD, Banca Transilvania and CEC in the sale of Asiban for 350 million euros, assisting DEGI in the acquisition of Iris Shopping Center (147 million euros) or the Voestalpine group in starting an energy greenfield project, whose value could exceed 5 billion euros.
"The growth is because we expanded the team and had a sizeable workload, considering the Voestalpine project alone requires five partners and about ten lawyers. In addition, our fees are approximately 15% higher than last year," explains Florentin Tuca, the other managing partner of the company.
After several years of steady development, the law firm could witness its lowest growth rate this year, as the business of some law firms suffered as a result of the international financial crisis that also affected the capital or real estate markets in Romania. The firm operates in various fields, including several infrastructure projects, where it is involved in the building of the Bucharest-Brasov highway or the Bucharest orbital road, as well as a number of lawsuits.