Ana Samsonia had an ambitious goal from the very start of her legal career – to carve out the niche of labor law that was significantly undervalued in the Georgian context. Today, as Head of the Legal Division at Ecovis Georgia, she offers businesses a unique service whose importance is increasingly hard to ignore – one where the stakes often involve not just large sums of money, but the livelihoods of thousands.
By Anton Kokaia
Ana, let’s start by talking about your company. What does Ecovis Georgia offer its clients?
Ecovis Georgia brings together several practice areas – tax, legal, accounting, and audit. All the services a business needs are united under one brand.
We cover a wide range of services. The company was originally founded with a focus on tax and brings together the most experienced tax law specialists in the field. They have experience across various sectors, and I would particularly like to emphasise the Revenue Service, where best practices in this area are actively developed. On the tax side, we offer tax support, consulting, audit, and other services.
In accounting, we offer a full spectrum as well – from providing accounting services to individual companies, to conducting accounting audits. The latter involves examining what errors have been made in the accounting process and supporting their correction. We also offer a service where we help set up accounting management within a company, assisting various businesses in elevating their accounting practices or building them from scratch.
The audit division covers financial audits, which are mandatory for a range of companies. One should also take into account that an audit service is very important for companies when it comes to risk management. Therefore, we also provide audits for entities with so-called “PIE status” (Public Interest Entities), which requires a higher level of audit process and qualification, and our team is staffed accordingly.
As for the legal division – which I lead – it’s worth noting that this service was added to Ecovis when I joined three years ago. We’ve brought in major clients to this department, which represents significant success in the Georgian market. We’re proud to work with clients who play an important role in Georgia’s business sector today.
What sets your division apart?
Ecovis’s legal division covers the full spectrum of legal services. First, I’d like to highlight classic legal support – helping clients navigate day-to-day operations and managing legal processes.
Second, there’s risk-based advisory. Some companies trust Ecovis with reviewing their employment policies or various legal matters. We conduct compliance checks – these companies already have in-house lawyers, but they need an audit of their legal processes.
The third area is probably the most interesting, and that’s crisis management. Finding the right partner for crisis management is critically important today. This is especially true for tax issues, and collective labor disputes have become prevalent as well. These two lines are leading areas at Ecovis.
Of course, individual disputes are very interesting in their own right, but managing a crisis affecting, say, 3,000 or 4,000 employees is a huge challenge. That directly impacts not just a certain subject, but society as a whole – in some cases it can bring an entire city to a standstill.
This has become our specialization – and it’s a genuinely unique service. There are many players in our sector offering various legal services to the society, but managing crisis situations and collective disputes are found only in our portfolio.
What made you decide to join Ecovis?
What appealed to me was Ecovis’s stability and global reputation. Ecovis is present in every country in the world. Importantly, it’s an organization with a long history and strong traditions. This is global expertise applied at the local level, giving us access to best practices from Ecovis across different countries.
I also want to mention that the Georgian representation specifically was interesting to me, because the managing partners here were professionals I looked up to. That’s why I took the step and accepted the offer.
I have experience at several companies where I worked in leadership positions. I had a clear understanding of business needs, but moving to the service side was a challenge for me as well.
How did you end up specifically in labor law?
My goal from the beginning was to specialize – modern law is unimaginable without specialization. For me, that meant commercial and labor law. From the start, I decided to be involved in labor law from every angle – as an advocate on the employee side, as an advocate on the employer side, as a court mediator, as a collective dispute mediator, and more.
For example, I spent over five years fully and wholeheartedly involved in mediating some of Georgia’s largest collective disputes. That gave me enormous experience, because it’s crucial to view labor law from every perspective. When you do, you understand what might be the key to unlocking a problem. If you only understand the business side, you can’t find common ground with employees, and vice versa. And without knowledge of corporate law, resolving labor disputes seems impossible to me. That experience also serves me well.
Labor relations encompasses a great deal. There used to be a perception that employment relations was the domain of HR professionals. Today, business has moved beyond that idea, since managing labor relations directly affects a company’s success, its revenues, its reputation, and its sustainability. Businesses understand this well.
What’s especially noteworthy is that a culture of collective disputes has developed in Georgia – employees are organizing, and managing to halt certain processes, for example through strikes. I won’t list the sectors for which this can be the cause of collapse. Of course, time is of the essence in these situations, and very rapid response is needed. No lawyer working on-site can acquire the complex experience needed in just a few days. This created a market need for a completely different type of professional.
I had planned for this from the beginning. Back then, this practice area wasn’t active in Georgia at all, but I was watching European societies, observing how labor relations were managed in different countries. Among other things, I gained experience at a German law firm specializing in labor law, with the support of the German Bar Association.
My goal was to develop a comprehensive vision and position myself as a negotiator, because I believe that’s where the future of a legal professional lies.
I knew exactly what I was doing, because I knew this type of professional didn’t exist in the legal market. Today I’m proud that Ecovis is the only entity with this expertise, and our service is the market leader.
What is Ecovis’s main competitive advantage?
This is precisely where it’s important that Ecovis brings together a multidisciplinary team of professionals. Oftentimes, a client doesn’t have a clear idea about what they exactly need and visits a lawyer. The lawyer’s analysis may reveal that the client actually needs a different kind of specialist, and that resolving their matter requires multi-faceted expertise. Therefore, our team can very easily and flexibly offer clients legal, accounting, and tax services.
This creates significant value for the client, because through a one-stop-shop model, they have access to a wide range of services and professionals. It’s an answer to a key challenge for business entities, as they have to find specialists in different places, and bringing them together as a single team is another issue when complex work is needed. In our case, the relevant party comes to us and receives all the services they need.
In that sense, Ecovis is a reliable partner when it comes to speed, crisis response, and high-quality professional support.
What made Ecovis become an important partner for big businesses in the labor law market?
That’s a good question, because big businesses are one of our primary target groups. I’d say that what matters most is not advertising, but advice grounded in experience and results. Business entities know this very well. They know how to find out who delivers results and in what timeframe. Our biggest supporters are our existing partners, who give us strong recommendations and that becomes the bridge to new ones.
How do you approach situations where the financial stakes are particularly high?
This is exactly where knowledge and experience come in. If we approach a legal problem as something very familiar, the matter becomes simpler.
We’re used to managing crises; for us, it’s everyday work. At Ecovis, you won’t find a case that’s simple or that doesn’t involve significant sums. So for us, this isn’t an unusual source of stress.
That doesn’t mean we’re indifferent. We simply know how to approach it and what paths to take. We engage with each matter with clarity, composure, and total control of the process.
How do you earn trust in situations where time is of the essence?
My key, first and foremost, is the truth. I never mask circumstances or oversimplify a situation. We go through issues very precisely and realistically. I think this is something that’s genuinely valued, especially by senior management, who are accustomed to having situations presented to them in a polished way.
Last but not least, tell us about your plans for the future.
The sustainability of our services is very important to us. Our goal is for our unique approaches and services to become a point of interest for every major player.
We aim to strengthen our track record in our strongest areas – the legal side of labor disputes and crisis management, as well as tax dispute management – and to get closer to the target audiences that matter to us.
We’re also very focused on what current trends require – whether that’s digitalization or modernizing management styles. Through this, we strive to continuously enable lawyers to work more flexibly and to raise the level of qualification.
I’d also like to emphasize once more that we want to share our experience – which has already left many businesses satisfied with the results – with more major players, and in doing so, help not only businesses but society as a whole, because these services contribute to the common good.
In labor law, it’s crucial to account for every actor involved in the field. Lawyers often consider only the parties sitting at the negotiating table, but that’s not the full reality. In managing labor crises, every actor involved in that policy can play a decisive role.
