The role of lawyers in Ukraine

Monday 16 February 2026

In countries whose legal systems evolved over centuries of relatively uninterrupted statehood, the role of the lawyer is often presented in abstract, almost sacerdotal terms. He or she advises upon rights, predicts judicial outcomes, interprets statutes and, ideally, guards the rule of law against executive excess. In Ukraine by contrast the lawyer’s function has developed along a more pragmatic and faintly paradoxical path. Here, amidst war, reform, corruption scandals, digital transformation and a labyrinthine administrative culture inherited from successive empires, the lawyer is frequently not so much a counsellor as a navigator. His role is not merely to interpret the law. It is to make the machinery of the state move at all.

To an outsider, Ukraine’s legal architecture appears formidable. She possesses a Constitution adopted in 1996 and amended repeatedly since; she has a civil code, a commercial code, criminal and administrative codes; she has reformed her Supreme Court, reconstituted her High Council of Justice, and established specialised anti-corruption bodies such as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and the High Anti-Corruption Court. On paper, this is a system converging steadily with continental European norms. In practice however the daily life of the law is something quite different.

The problem is not merely corruption, although that remains an ambient anxiety in certain sectors. The deeper difficulty lies in the interaction of layers: Soviet administrative reflexes embedded in ministries; post-independence legislative surges enacted in haste; waves of reform driven by the demands of the European Union; and emergency wartime decrees issued under martial law. Statutes overlap. Subordinate regulations contradict primary legislation. Interpretations vary between regions. Officials rotate. Digital registers exist, but their operation depends upon human discretion.

In this environment legal advice in the abstract can feel almost theatrical. A lawyer may explain what the code provides. He may cite jurisprudence of the Supreme Court. He may analyse the intentions of Parliament. Yet when the client presents himself at a district office, seeking a permit, a registration, a certificate or an extract, the result may turn not upon textual exegesis but upon whether the official in question accepts the form, interprets the rule generously, or simply declines to process the application.

Thus emerges the distinctly Ukrainian conception of the lawyer as fixer—not in the pejorative sense of bribery or influence-peddling, but in the more prosaic sense of someone who knows which corridor to walk down, which annex to attach, which registry entry to anticipate, which official requires a covering letter framed in precisely the correct bureaucratic idiom. The lawyer becomes a translator between citizen and state.

This phenomenon is particularly visible in property law. Ukraine’s land market, liberalised only recently after decades of moratorium, is governed by a thicket of cadastral regulations, historical title inconsistencies and overlapping local competencies. A foreign investor, or even an ordinary Ukrainian attempting to consolidate inherited plots, may discover that what appears legally permissible is administratively unattainable without professional intermediation. The lawyer does not merely opine upon ownership. He assembles the historical chain of documents, secures extracts from state registries, ensures the notary’s compliance with anti-money laundering rules, reconciles discrepancies in the cadastral map and, crucially, persuades each institutional actor to act.

Corporate law offers a similar portrait. Registering a company in Ukraine can be accomplished digitally within hours—at least in theory. The state’s digital platform, Diia—an application through which citizens may access public services—symbolises Ukraine’s ambition to modernise her bureaucracy. Yet when shareholders are foreign, when capital originates abroad, when directors are subject to sanctions screening, or when wartime currency controls intervene, the process acquires friction. Again the lawyer’s role shifts from doctrinal advice to choreography. He aligns tax registration, banking compliance, migration status and notarial certification in a sequence that produces a tangible result: a functioning enterprise.

Even litigation reflects this dynamic. Ukrainian courts have undergone waves of reform, and many judges are diligent and conscientious. Nonetheless procedure can be unpredictable. Hearings are adjourned for reasons opaque to the parties. Enforcement of judgments may depend upon the practical capacity of bailiffs. Here too the lawyer’s utility lies less in forecasting victory than in shepherding the case through procedural shoals—filing motions at the right moment, anticipating documentary demands, ensuring that service of process cannot be impugned.

War has intensified these tendencies. Martial law has generated decrees altering labour rights, property requisition powers, mobilisation obligations and tax rules. Businesses relocate from frontline regions to safer western cities such as Lviv. Documentation is lost, archives destroyed, personnel displaced. The lawyer becomes archivist and strategist simultaneously. He reconstructs files, negotiates with military administrations, secures temporary exemptions, and interprets emergency norms whose durability is uncertain. The question is not simply what the law says; it is how the law is being applied this month.

There is an historical explanation for this peculiarity. For centuries Ukrainian lands were governed from elsewhere—by imperial centres whose administrative logic was distant from local needs. Under the Soviet system law functioned less as a shield for the individual than as an instrument of state planning. The habit of navigating bureaucracy rather than invoking rights became culturally embedded. Independence in 1991 did not immediately dissolve these reflexes. Instead it overlaid them with ambitious but sometimes uneven legislative reform.

Yet it would be mistaken to portray this as merely a dysfunction. In a society under immense strain—fighting for territorial survival, reforming her institutions and aligning with European standards—the lawyer’s practical orientation has virtues. It produces outcomes. It enables commerce, property transfers, inheritance settlements and regulatory compliance to occur despite systemic ambiguity. It is a species of resilience.

Moreover the role is evolving. Younger lawyers, trained in European universities and conversant with comparative jurisprudence, increasingly seek to transform the culture from one of navigation to one of predictability. Judicial reform, anti-corruption enforcement and digital transparency aim to reduce the discretionary fog. If Ukraine’s candidacy for membership of the European Union advances to full accession, her legal order will require greater coherence and foreseeability. In that future, the advisory dimension of legal practice may assume greater prominence.

For now however the Ukrainian lawyer occupies a liminal space between text and practice. He is part jurist, part bureaucratic guide, part diplomat. He reassures clients not by promising that the law is clear, but by demonstrating that the system, however tangled, can be made to function. In a country where the administrative maelstrom is not an abstraction but a daily lived reality, this is no small achievement.

It is tempting, especially for those trained in more stable jurisdictions, to lament the absence of crystalline legal certainty. Yet there is something peculiarly Ukrainian in this adaptive professionalism. She has long survived by improvisation—politically, militarily and economically. Her lawyers mirror this national temperament. They do not merely interpret the law. They coax it into life.