Ion Nestor's story from the first days after Revolution to business law

Ion Nestor, now almost 57, is one of the most respected lawyers in Romania, having gone through the "storms" of the big privatisations, such as that of Petrom, BCR, and Romtelecom.

But the route to forming a team of over 100 lawyers and an around 15 million-euro business started in the same simple manner as most businesses developed by Romanian entrepreneurs did, in the first few days after the Romanian Revolution of 1989.

"We decided to become consultants before there were any privately-held businesses, in February 1990. I took a step back from my work as a barrister without giving it up completely, though, and we started to organise like we knew any company was supposed to," recounts Ion Nestor, founding partner of law firm Nestor Nestor Diculescu Kingston Petersen.

The lawyer, together with his wife, Manuela Nestor, were relying on experience accumulated within the Institutul Roman de Consultanta (Romanian Consulting Institute) Romconsult, which used to handle Romania's engineering and services exports.

The company went from drawing up documentation for the establishment of trading companies to corporate consulting services, with its first major corporate client being Quadrant Amroq Beverages.

The next major step in the company's business came in the summer of 1994, when the Nestors decided to become associated with American lawyers Andrew Kingston and Patricia Petersen, with the merger becoming effective on January 1st of 1995 and leading to the creation of NNKP.

At the beginning of the noughties two events had an impact on the company's activity - the withdrawal of the Americans and a new merger with Ana Diculescu Sova's firm, which was to add a D to the firm's current name - NNDKP.

During its over 20 years of existence, the firm run by Nestor was considered a model of stability. However, in the autumn of last year the first crack occurred in the organisation, when Francisc Peli, Carmen Peli and Cristina Filip, three of the partners, together with a small group of lawyers, decided to leave the firm and start their own business.

On the positive side, the separation occurred in 2008, at the end of the 2003-2008 period, when business lawyers were overburdened by the large volumes of mergers and acquisitions.

"Now we are all very far from that - we are much less crowded, which allows us to do things we couldn't do well enough in the past few years - training programmes, internal organisation, communication and human resource policies (...)," Nestor says.