Ants Mailend joins Sorainen as a partner from the beginning of September 2016. He will further strengthen the Sorainen Dispute Resolution Team as well as its Commercial Contracts Team and Intellectual Property Practice in Estonia.
“I have known Ants for more than 20 years as a person of high integrity and a great professional with a very good reputation within the legal community in Estonia,” comments senior partner Aku Sorainen. “In fact I tried to hire him 20 years ago when he returned to Estonia after finishing his master studies abroad and then again about 15 years ago, but he was very dedicated at that time to building up the firm he worked for back then.”
Ants Mailend was one of the five first partners of the law firm Varul in Estonia, and was with the company for over 20 years before joining Sorainen.
Ants affirms that he is extremely happy to be joining the Sorainen partnership. ‘Over the years I have been watching the outstanding development of Sorainen with interest and respect,” he observes. “It is an honour and a professional challenge to join the leading and only truly integrated Baltic-Belarusian law firm.’
Aku Sorainen praises Mailend as a strong “all-rounder”, since he has been practising in various fields of business law. “One aspect of our strategy is to gradually widen the scope of work for many of our lawyers and Ants fits well with this strategic approach,” notes Sorainen.
At his previous work place, Ants Mailend managed the dispute resolution, banking & finance, corporate and M&A, and IT & IP practices. He has been a member of the Estonian Bar Association since 1996 and has also been on the board of the Estonian Bar Association for several years. He has regularly served as an arbitrator in institutional and ad hoc arbitrations. He has also served as a bankruptcy trustee, liquidator, and member of the management and supervisory boards of many companies. Ants Mailend studied law at the universities of Tartu and Amsterdam, focusing on product liability and EU competition law. He has an LL.M. from Amsterdam University in EU business law.
Ants Mailend subscribes to the view that the importance of dispute resolution in legal business is increasing. “A large full service law firm should develop this practice in order to guarantee quality, increase market share and to have a balanced portfolio for leverage at times of market fluctuation”, he said.
