Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners Sponsored the first White Nights International Legal Forum

From May 28 to 30, 2010 Saint Petersburg hosted the White Nights International Legal Forum organised by LegalStudies.RU and sponsored by Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners.

The Forum’s programme involved themed sessions, roundtables and panel discussions, which attracted over 140 delegates from the leading law firms across Russia, corporate lawyers, executives of Russian and foreign companies, attorneys-at-law, government and judiciary officials. The members discussed top issues of law enforcement and current development trends in legal services markets.

Ilya Nikiforov, a managing partner of Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners, Law Offices, moderated the session entitled Forum Shopping Yet Legitimate: drafting the most effective arbitration clause in the international contracts. During the session lawyers from the UK, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Russia discussed respectively aspects of national regulations relevant in commercial arbitration with regard to the litigation venue and the basics of drafting arbitration clauses in international contracts.

Vladimir Lobastov, a senior lawyer at Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners, the head of antitrust practice presided over a round table discussion Fair Competition and the Internet. The discussion was largely attended by Federal Antitrust Service officials, legal practitioners, notaries and attorneys-at-law. It focused on holding back bad faith competition through the Internet, detecting breaches in that area, collecting evidence, identifying wrongdoers, and authority of government agencies to prevent bad faith competition through the Internet. Irina Stepanova, a senior lawyer at EPAM, the head of intellectual property practice, offered a presentation Identifying Wrongdoers in the Internet during a round table discussion.
For the first time the Russian legal community was offered to discuss draft interjurisdictional voluntary ethical and professional principles of legal practice in the CIS economic space developed by a number of experts as a follow-up to the International Bar Association conference Law Firm Management at the request of the CIS Local Counsel Forum.

One of the key events of the social program of the Forum was the business lunch for the attorneys-at-law from across Russia hosted by Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners to develop partnership relations between the attorneys-at-law and legal practitioners from across Russia and the country’s major economic centres Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

The agenda of the Forum also included the Open Day at Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners. The EPA&P lawyers discussed with their peers from Novosibirsk, Kursk, Krasnoyarsk, Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg the issues of legal practice in some Russian regions and shared their experience of complicated and unusual litigation.

”A large-scale event involving legal practitioners based in the North-West Region and generally throughout Russia has been long overdue. Today lawyers and attorneys-at-law feel compelled to maintain contacts and cooperation, and to work jointly on matters and cases. EPA&P team is often having hard time looking for a good expert in a specific area in such places as Vologda, Kaliningrad, Arkhangelsk, Syktyvkar, Petrozavodsk and other cities of the North-West Region. The White Nights Legal Forum became an opportunity for us to know about such fellow lawyers and establish contacts for future cooperation. The synergy created by the excellent atmosphere of Saint Petersburg and the tight Forum agenda allowed all the delegates to combine work and leisure and branded this event in our memories forever”, Ilya Nikiforov, a managing partner of Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners, a co-chairman of the Organising Board of the Forum said.