Paulina Opiełka

Specializations

Paulina heads the corporate law and M&A transactions department.

She specialises in investment entry and exit transactions, M&A and corporate services for companies, private equity investors and venture capital funds. She supports entrepreneurs in the processes of commercialisation of R&D results, raising capital from private and public funds and in divestment processes. She advises several VC funds co-financed from NCBR and PFR funds (BRIdge Alfa, PFR Starter, PFR Open Innovations, Swiss-Polish Cooperation Programme). She negotiates investment agreements and coordinates legal and financial due diligence, of which the law firm conducts dozens every year, with a value ranging from several to over a hundred million PLN.

Experience

She has been involved in numerous acquisition and investment processes in Poland and abroad. She advised a large group of IT companies in M&A transactions in the USA, Argentina, Romania and Moldova. She advised a Polish AI startup in obtaining financing and going public in Canada. She also supported a Polish-Norwegian manufacturing group in a sale combined with an MBO process to a market-leading CEE investment fund. She has participated in a number of stock market merger transactions as well as in negotiating debt financing for acquisitions amounting to almost PLN 200 million. She is a regular advisor to many private and public-private investment funds and supports small, medium and large companies in PE sales and investment processes.

In her daily practice, she advises funds, accelerators and business incubators, e.g. in negotiating agreements with grantors and strategic partners, preparing corporate structures, obtaining financing, including from the European Space Agency, among others. She provides advice to start-ups as an expert on behalf of the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development and the Technology Entrepreneurship Foundation, in particular in the areas of med-tech, automation and engineering, fin-tech and IoT.

Publications

Since 2017, she has been a member of the Krakow Bar Association. She completed the arbitration and mediation course of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris and is certified as a mediator. She provides training in mediation and communication and coordinated the international project on mediation ‘First ADR Kit’. She has been awarded in the Wolters Kluwer ‘Rising Stars Lawyers – Leaders of Tomorrow 2021’ competition and has been repeatedly recognised in the Rzeczpospolita ranking as a recommended lawyer in the field of Commercial, Corporate Law, Mergers and Acquisitions.