Successfully registered medical journal with all-Ukrainian status

Registration of specialized medical journal in Ukraine

In September of 2013, our firm received a request for legal services provision from an individual who wanted to register his specialized medical journal with an all-Ukrainian coverage.

The founder of the magazine was our Client, a natural person, a Professor and a Doctor of Medicine.

Prior to contacting our company, the Client had tried to register a print medium on their own but received a refusal from the registering authority.

In July 2013, certain changes took place in the legislation regulating the operations of print media. One of those changes greatly affected the registration process, in particular, of magazines. The Client did not know about that, having used old, outdated, sample documents available free of charge on the Internet, which led to a significant loss of time.

The essence of the changes was that from that point on the registering authority was obliged, besides the information about the founders of a print medium, to also receive information about the persons associated with the print medium under consideration. At the same time, the definition of affiliated parties in the law was very vague. The main criterion for determining whether the persons were considered to be related was the concept of “control”, which one person exercises over the other.

The legislator did not bother to clarify the definition of control, nor did they even indicate the standard wording in such cases “over the business operations of a person”. It is not surprising that the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine also did not have an unequivocal opinion about who exactly belongs to the category of affiliated persons, whose data and to what extent should be indicated in the application.

Such situations often arise in practice, and the lawyers of our company have got experience in resolving them. The situation of our Client was no exception: thanks to the quality of communication with the employees of the Ministry, it was possible to quickly get to a common understanding of the requirements of the law and correctly draft an application for registering the magazine.

The first submission of the package of documents led to a positive result, which pleased the Client a lot. In that case, it took the lawyers of our company a total of one calendar month to finalize the process of registering a printed medium, which was exactly called for by the conditions for the provision of a standard procedure for registering a printed medium, as well as the contract for the provision of legal services.