GREEK BUSINESS LAW

Published under the auspices of Nomiki Bibliothiki, the Kelemenis & Co. Series in Business Law aims to provide handbooks and monographs for businesses and legal practitioners and do so in plain language and with a pragmatic approach. It is an initiative that has evolved beyond the firmʼs numerous publications, in Greek and in English, over the past few years, which have communicated some of the firmʼs accumulated knowledge and experience of the practice of business law to a wider audience. Together with Nomiki Bibliothiki, we have concluded that the time was ripe for the firmʼs well-received publications to go beyond legal and tax newsletters and alerts, and beyond articles in refereed journals and chapters in edited volumes, some of which have already been published by prominent law publishers (e.g. Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Sweet & Maxwell). Indeed, the driving force behind launching such a business law series, a novelty for the Greek legal setting, is the need for publications in core areas of business law, which are written in a straightforward and practical manner for both lawyers and non-lawyers without compromising the key qualities expected of a legal publication. This is the need that Nomiki Bibliothiki and Kelemenis & Co. have set out to tackle by launching this new series.

Ιn the case of this first volume “Greek Business Law: A Handbook for Businesses and Legal Practitioners”, it has been assessed that an outline of Greek business law, which is written in English and can reach out to a readership beyond the Greek business and legal community, is missing from the existing literature and that an English text can better facilitate the access of businesses, domestic and foreign, and of foreign legal practitioners to Greek business law. The approach that the series and this first volume aim to serve is demonstrated by the broad definition given to business law. Rather than being closely linked to commercial law (to which, of course, it is), business law has been treated as a wider body of law that encompasses all key areas of law that impact the operation of a business. In this context, branches of law such as employment, tax, public procurement, data protection or commercial litigation, which would not normally find their way into typical business/commercial law books, have been integrated into the seriesʼ definition of business law to reflect their strong relevance to the way a business operates and is regulated.

“Greek Business Law: A Handbook for Businesses and Legal Practitioners” has drawn, to a large extent, on the firmʼs everyday commercial and business experience. Clearly, it is a handbook that is not exhaustive in terms of either scope or each chapterʼs subject matter. There are areas that have been put aside to be dealt with in a later edition; and there are sections whose degree of detail could arguably be greater. Be that as it may, my objective has been to provide a reasonably sufficient degree of detail for a book that needs to strike a good balance between being a reference work and a handbook with a voluminous subject matter that cannot be dealt with in its entirety nor in substantial detail. In this context, the objective of this book is to cover most key areas of Greek business law in a clear, informative and succinct manner without following strict rules of scholarly writing (e.g. footnotes and references) or covering every possible aspect of Greek business law.