Compliance
Every company is unique – as an entity as well as in terms of the legal and business environment in which it operates. Recent years have brought a turn towards a heavier regulatory touch; business entities are required to comply with increasingly compendious rules, and face increasingly severe penalties if – even inadvertently – they don’t.
Timely reaction to legislative changes, relevant training for managerial and general staff, devising and implementing appropriate policies, and correctly responding if the competent regulators choose to take action – all this becomes very difficult without recourse to specialised knowledge.
GESSEL’s compliance practice assembles within a single team specialists from the various legal fields in which compliance issues are particularly important. By pooling our expertise within this single interdisciplinary group, we can offer modular, scalable and custom-built compliance solutions, complete with implementation of procedures, training for staff, and ad hoc support.
The members of our compliance team specialise in, respectively, competition law, employment law, personal data protection, securities markets, and public procurement; some of them bring to the table past experience at national regulators. In true GESSEL fashion, these core competencies can be readily augmented with the skills of other lawyers at our firm, as required by the case at hand.
Once up and running, a professional compliance programme enables:
- Reduction of the risk of violations and irregularities;
- Efficient damage control if a violation or irregularity does occur;
- Convincing demonstration that any one-off violation is nothing more than that and that, accordingly, regulators and the business community at large need not worry that such an event is symptomatic of any graver problems.
If a compliance programme is to translate into real added value, it should be customised for the given enterprise. Such a holistic, individualised product is best prepared by experts.
GESSEL’s compliance practice covers:
- Codes of operation;
- Anti-corruption policies;
- Whistleblowing systems;
- Transparency policies, terms of cooperation;
- Anti-discrimination policies;
- Training systems;
- Procedures mandated by industry-specific laws;
- Instructions for reacting to audit and enforcement measures by the authorities (e.g. dawn raids).
GESSEL’s compliance practice is led by Bernadeta Kasztelan-Świetlik, partner.
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