Maria Kanak
Attorney-at-law
Maria has started her legal career in the Competition Protection Department of Office for Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKIK), (recently on the position of a Deputy Director). She spent fourteen years in the Office, co-participating in shaping and pursuing policy of the state competition protection.
Next, she worked for the law office of so called Big Four consulting companies and one of the biggest Polish law offices, where she provided counsel on competition and consumer law, contractual advantage and payment gridlocks.
She views law as a tool to meet business objectives. She focuses on devising solutions which, while compliant with binding regulations, achieve assumed business goals to the biggest possible extent. She systematically reaches for non-standard solutions, requiring ‘out of the box thinking’. Her position is that ‘old’ schemes will not stand the test in the constantly changing world.
Maria is in her element lecturing and teaching. In her opinion a good training is not a lecture but interaction with the audience. At the same time, she is herself open to new knowledge and experiences, indispensable, in her view, for effective legal counselling. She believes that until one fully understands the business sector and the problem, one will not be able to come up with a ‘tailor-made’ solution.
After work, a full-time parent, fascinated by psychology and history of medicine as well as agile management.
Experience
Selected projects:
- Devising a model of contract conclusion between a dominant market position entrepreneur and entrepreneurs forming the purchasing group,
- Devising a cooperation model within the purchasing group formed by market competitors and within a pharmaceutical franchise chain,
- Evaluation of a dominant market position entrepreneur’s sale offers from a legal and competition perspective,
- Support in devising a distribution model of medicinal products of limited market accessibility,
- Support in a distributor selection process,
- Assistance in devising a distribution model, including drafting an agreement based on reserving exclusivity for distributors operating in parallel,
- Support in adjusting FMCG chain operation model to new requirements of the Act on Contractual Advantage,
- Day-to-day support for FMCG chain,
- Analysis of the entrepreneur’s website content from consumer risks perspective,
- Support in adjusting documentation used in relations with individual entrepreneurs to Consumer Law requirements,
- Support in proceedings conducted by OCCP (UOKIK) President in cases regarding competition, practices infringing collective consumer interests and unfair use of contractual advantage, as well as assistance in litigation arising from these proceedings,
- Preparing an entrepreneur for OCCP President inspection or search; preparing rules and action guidelines in this respect as well as trainings in the scope of OCCP President inspection/search.
My specializations