Lawyers at the helm of joint stock companies

The transformation of the legal profession in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was closely linked to the economic boom in the Monarchy. Some historians have regarded lawyers as a 'managerial substitute', serving on the boards of directors and supervisory boards of joint-stock companies. According to contemporary sources, in particular the economic yearbooks of the Hungarian Compass, lawyers often held directorships and deputy directorships, but they also held a number of posts of legal advisers to companies.

Those who were closely linked to the business world through their clients or their positions were called 'mercantile lawyers' by their contemporaries. A growing number of lawyers, mainly in the capital, used their opportunities and contacts to specialise in representing companies, acting as their legal advisers or even managing them strategically and operationally. The lawyers in the capital, and to a lesser extent in the countryside, thus began to specialise in terms of both their representation and their activities from the last third of the 19th century.

Izidor Simon was a striking example of a 'mercantile lawyer'. 'Simon began his career in the late 1870s as a legal adviser to the Concordia Steam Mill, and was elected to the mill's supervisory board in 1900. In the early 1900s he retained his position as legal adviser to the mill, as well as his position as manager of a provincial savings bank, and in 1910 he was appointed strategic manager and controller of three mining companies at the same time. Izidor Simon, who had been made a royal councillor, was still practising in the 1930s.

Simon's social embeddedness relied heavily on Gyula Kelemen, who held a leading position at the Concordia mill for a decade and a half, through whom he was able to contact 12 other economically active lawyers, including the most influential, Mór Mezei, who held 49 posts in 1910. At least to this extent, Simon's links with the 3 players of the Borsodi Coal Mining Company were decisive, for example, the board member Soma Fenyő could have been a contact for Béla Schóber, Frigyes Fellner or Frigyes Piufsich. Simon's network of contacts therefore shows that he had direct or first-level indirect contacts with 43 lawyers in economic positions only, and that these actors held a total of 343 positions."