EEDRF Partners

Dually qualified in Paris and Latvia, Dr. Galina Zukova is a leading arbitration practitioner with twenty years of legal experience. She has served as an arbitrator (president, sole arbitrator, co-arbitrator and emergency arbitrator alike) in cases conducted under the most major institutional rules, including the ICC, LCIA, DIS, VIAC, SCC and Milan Chamber of Arbitration. She also regularly represents clients (individuals, corporate and state entities), and acts as expert in international arbitration proceedings.

Before founding her own firm in 2019, Dr. Zukova was a Partner with a boutique law firm and a lawyer in the top International Arbitration Practice Group of a major international law firm based in Paris. Prior to this, she worked as Counsel at the ICC International Court of Arbitration, where she was in charge of the case management team handling matters involving parties from Central and Eastern Europe, Turkey and Greece. In that role, she oversaw hundreds of arbitration proceedings and scrutinized hundreds of arbitral awards. Her previous work experience also includes the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, a leading Baltic law firm and the Latvian European Integration Bureau (Latvian Government), where she was in charge of the legal aspects of Latvia's accession to the European Union.

Dr. Zukova is a Member of the ICC International Court of Arbitration, a Board Member of the Finland Arbitration Institute (FAI), and a Vice-Chair of the Arbitration Council of the Georgian International Arbitration Centre (GIAC). She is a Council Member of the ICC Institute of World Business Law and a Member of the Organizing Committee of the ICCA Congress 2021. She is also an Associate Professor at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin (Paris-Saclay) and the Riga Graduate School of Law.

A Latvian lawyer by training (LLB, University of Latvia), Galina has a PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and an LLM from the University of Exeter (UK). She was also a Visiting Scholar at the Yale University (US).

Dr. Zukova is fluent in English, French, Italian, Latvian, Russian and Spanish. She has a working knowledge of German.

Galina is ranked in: Who's Who Legal: Thought Leader – Arbitration 2021; WWL: Arbitration – Arbitrators and Counsel; WWL: Arbitration – Future Leaders; and WWL France: Arbitration (every year as of 2017); Euromoney's ExpertGuides Commercial Arbitration (2020). WWL 2019 ranked her as Number 2 of the "Most Highly Regarded" Future Arbitration Leaders, and writes: "Galina Zukova … is "an excellent and experienced lawyer with a particular focus on CIS-related cases", according to sources. They note, "She has vast experience in and great knowledge of ICC arbitration proceedings."" In 2018, ArbitralWomen included Galina in its publication "Women Pioneers in Dispute Resolution".

Read more: zukova.legal