We are happy to congratulate our experienced colleague on her new title! As of May, Kaidi Reiljan-Sihvart has been promoted to Managing Associate. We had a chat with Kaidi about her thoughts and goals in relation to her new role.
Which field of law are you currently engaged in?
Throughout my career as an attorney, I have always been and still am a disputant. This means that I advise and represent clients in both pre-action disputes and in various dispute resolution instances, primarily in court. What makes this profession interesting and distinctive from other specialisations in that disputants usually don’t work with one specific area of law, apart from procedural law. A disputant is, figuratively speaking, a Jack-of-all-trades since we work across many different areas of substantive law, starting, for example, with family law and succession law and ending with disputes under company law. Perhaps today I’ll learn about the construction and constituent parts of a truck tyre for an insurance dispute, tomorrow the details of community of the estate in a succession dispute, and the day after tomorrow the basis for an action for a positive declaration or an opposing action in a company law dispute. I’m happy to do it because I find it challenging and stimulating. If I were to try and narrow it down, I deal mostly with civil and administrative disputes, including insurance disputes in particular (in addition to my professional work I also act as an insurance conciliator). For example, I find media, professional and company law disputes extremely fascinating.
How has your journey been to the new title?
My answer is probably not very original. The path to this point has been largely organic. One thing has led to another and so on. There are things that have not been planned for, and there are also things that I have worked very hard to achieve. With the exception of the titles of attorney and attorney-at-law (which are explicitly required for this profession), no title has been an end in itself for me – rather, they have been an added bonus of professional work. I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to work in an area that does not bring joy and offer fulfilment. I also believe that it’s very difficult to be successful in areas that you have no inherent interest in. To date I have thus mainly been driven by interest in and love for my work, as well as my desire to see to the support and mentoring of the next generation of young lawyers/attorneys.
What have been your biggest challenges during your career?
My biggest challenges are mainly related to human ordeals. For example, when it came to studying for the exam to become an attorney-at-law, I had to sneak out of the house early in the morning on Mother’s Day to study for the exam until late at night. And then there are also the intricate ethical conflicts over how to best advise and represent someone if my own beliefs are very different from theirs. Fortunately, however, there have been very few such occasions. Reconciling work and private life and avoiding burn-out has also proven to be quite a challenge. My husband, three daughters and close friends regard me as a workaholic because being an attorney is hardly a 9 to 5 job. It could very well happen that I have to stay up to prepare procedural documents while everyone else is fast asleep. It’s also not uncommon to work on weekends. Or it might happen that procedural time limits prevent me from accompanying my family on a fun outing. As everyone I know has come to learn – the most important time of day for me is 23:59 when procedural time limits end :). At the same time, I take a very conscious approach to maintaining work-life balance and I’ve devised a few tricks and mechanisms to keep my head above water (such as regular exercise, and adhering to a sleep schedule). I must mention here that I very much appreciate the way COBALT looks after its employees and has set up a very effective system of sabbaticals for them to take time off when needed. In terms of professional challenges, one of the biggest in recent times was certainly the complex media dispute between the Suislepp family and Postimees. After years of controversy, the result generated quite a stir in local media as no one had ever seen such a volume of refuting statements before.
What else would you like to do in your field?
I’m all in favour of dreaming big! At the same time, as neuroscientist Jaan Aru has pointed out, you have to pursue your dreams by setting realistic (intermediate) goals – there is no point having the sole goal of becoming as rich as Elon Musk or as saintly as the Pope in 5 years’ time. Right now, my lesser goals are to ensure that all my procedural documents are always sufficiently concise, concentrated and to the point, that my feedback on the work of my younger colleagues is concrete and constructive, and that neither I nor my colleagues forget the fact that a healthy body makes a healthy mind!
