It was a trip to France that changed the course of Jaromír Císař's life. It brought him his first case for his own law firm and kicked off an era during which he and his partners built a business with an annual turnover of half a billion crowns.
You probably know the name: Miroslav Grégr, former government minister, but also former head of the Děčín-based company Desta. A company that supplied forklift trucks not only to Czechoslovakia. It was a few years after the Velvet Revolution, and Desta began to look westward instead of toward the falling Eastern markets. And it seemed to be successful. A fax arrived at one of the offices in Děčín with an order from France for 60 forklifts, which soon made their way west. But what did not make it back to Czechoslovakia was the money. We will leave this episode for now, but we will come back to it later.
In post-revolutionary Prague, two friends, former classmates from law school, met. Jaromír Císař and Pavel Smutný. Both in their thirties. One was teaching at the faculty at the time, the other was researching at the Institute of State and Law at the Academy of Sciences. It was a good time for business, but... "We didn't immediately think about starting a law firm," recalls Císař, who at the time received an offer to go on a six-month internship at the Sorbonne with twelve other young lawyers from the Eastern Bloc.
He accepted; the chance to spend six months in the West was too good to turn down...
The text was published in Forbes Česko magazine.
