As one of the objectives of the Commercial Law Center Project, the professional development of legal specialists in the area of commercial (business) law involves several strategic tasks. First, to train lawyers working for the state and practicing lawyers on the basic aspects of commercial law, during both week-long or two-week thematic workshops and short-term continuing legal education (CLE) seminars. Second, insofar as commercial law in Ukraine is not yet recognized as a separate field of law, one of the objectives of the Project is to develop the curriculum of Commercial Law course, as well as curricula of special courses which would be also taken as part of this area of concentration. To this end, the Project's partners-the University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy" and the Yaroslav Mudry Law Academy of Ukraine-are expected to contribute by creating legal clinics and student internship programs in the court system. Third, the abovementioned tasks will be strengthened by an active publications program highlighting professional topics.

The department was charged with these worthy tasks when our work commenced. Since there is quite a number of seminars being held in Ukraine for lawyers these days, there was some anxiety that we would not be able to distinguish ourselves among them, or overlap in the work already being done by others. Therefore, we began by surveying lawyers, both those in the civil service and those in private practice, on the kinds of seminar topics they would be interested in. We also analyzed the work of other international assistance programs and held many consultations with scholars, practitioners, legal consultants with other projects, etc. Finally, preliminary topics were selected for workshops and CLE seminars for lawyers.
Needless to say, the results of the participant surveys for the  week-long workshops on "Business Enterprises as Subjects of Entrepreneurial Activities" were awaited impatiently, and we were very pleased to find that all the participants wished to attend future seminars organized by the CLC.

Speakers at our seminars are well-known scholars and practicing lawyers in Ukraine, judges of the Supreme Court of Ukraine and High Arbitration Court of Ukraine, and legal advisors to USAID projects. In addition, faculty from the International Law Institute of Washington are very well received, since they not only offer interesting material for comparative study in commercial law, but they also use interactive methods to present it that are new for us.
Our audience comprises mostly young people who have just started their career in the civil service or who have already achieved some success but still want to augment their knowledge. The interaction between state employees and practitioners during such seminars is especially useful, for everybody is interested in the problems encountered in the practice of applying commercial law.

Today, we can speak of certain accomplishments. Our teaching seminars are extremely popular, and their attendees are moving more and more from being passive recipients of information to actively participating in the discussions. We expect that the work of our organization will help them to understand that upgrading qualifications in commercial law is an idea whose time has come, and one which will promote market reforms in Ukraine.