Baker McKenzie has strengthened its antitrust and competition practice in Poland with the arrival of partner Marcin Trepka from DWF.

Trepka joins the firm’s Warsaw office and brings with him three members of his team, competition lawyers Elzbieta Buczkowska, Martyna Wurm and Lucja Olszewska.

Tomasz Krzyzowski, head of Baker McKenzie’s transactional practice in Warsaw, said: “[Trepka’s] vast legal experience and pro-customer attitude will contribute significantly to the success of our antitrust and competition practice. We now have one of the largest teams of competition experts among the law firms in Warsaw.”

Trepka specialises in Polish and EU competition law, focusing on restrictive practices and agreements, such as cartels, antitrust litigation, merger control and state aid. He also has experience in consumer law around regulation and litigation. He started his career at Chadbourne & Parke in Warsaw, before joining K&L Gates in 2012, where he worked his way up to partner and head of the firm’s competition and antitrust team. K&L Gates became DWF Poland last year.

Trepka said: “This move is a perfect opportunity for us to contribute to the firm’s world-class competition and antitrust practice. We will, in particular, focus on private enforcement, anticompetitive agreements, antitrust compliance and unilateral conduct areas.”

Buczkowska joins the firm as counsel and brings with her almost 15 years of experience litigating commercial cases in Polish courts. Before joining K&L, she worked in the Polish government, overseeing a team of government lawyers. Wurm, meantime, joins as a senior associate specialising in anti-competitive agreements, abuse of a dominant market position and private enforcement of competition law. She joined K&L as a summer intern in 2013 before being made a junior associate in 2014, while Olszewska supports the practice in various aspects of Polish and EU competition law.

Nicolas Kredel, the firm’s Dusseldorf-based EMEA antitrust and competition chair, said: “It has been our goal to grow our Polish competition practice as this is a key market for many of our clients. We look forward to collaborating with Marcin and the rest of the team to further strengthen our practice in Warsaw through their collective expertise and experience, particularly in the private enforcement area.” In June, Poland firms JS Legal and Zieba & Partners combined to form 14-partner outfit B2R Law Jankowski Stroinski Zieba and US law firm Littler secured an alliance with Polish employment specialists Paruch Chrusciel Schiffter.

In April, CMS Poland hired a group of private equity lawyers from Clifford Chance.