Law Days in St. Petersburg

The Fourth International Legal Forum took place in St. Petersburg on May 18th, 2016. This year, the forum attracted about 7,000 participants from 90 countries. They included leading lawyers from global corporations as well as ministers, judges, and legal partners. Students and lecturers from HSE in St. Petersburg were also among the participants.

This year, about 60 students were participating in organizing one of the most important annual events in the legal community and continuing the tradition of cooperation between the HSE School of Law in St. Petersburg and the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum. Volunteering experience and foreign language proficiency were taken into account when selecting the volunteers. After the first stage of selection, training was conducted where the supervisors met the future volunteers and carried out some teambuilding games. The games were aimed at evaluating the future employees’ actions in various modeled situations. This is how they fostered a motivation for mutual support.

Some feedback from the volunteers:

Nadezhda Timusheva, 4th-year undergraduate student, supervisor at the 2016 Forum

I’ve been volunteering at the forum since my 1^st year of undergraduate studies, and this year I was invited as a supervisor. Now I organize the volunteer work. All 4^th-year students who take part this year have been volunteering since the first year of their studies. This is a unique opportunity for each of us to be part of an event of global importance. The forum gives us great experience in organizing, since we have to quickly solve problems that aren’t usually faced by students in everyday life. It’s not easy to be a volunteer, but it’s a good test of your ability to handle stress, be attentive, focused and fast.

Daria Shimanko, undergraduate student at the HSE School of Law in St. Petersburg

I volunteered at the UN Conference, and wanted to volunteer again at the International Legal Forum. I wanted to work closely with outstanding lawyers from all over the world and to get some useful information from the roundtable discussions. Such events are a great motivation to develop oneself.

Elena Strelkova, undergraduate student at the HSE School of Law in St. Petersburg

I decided to volunteer for the 2016 International Legal Forum, since this would give me an opportunity to meet some respected legal experts from all over the world, to see how the forum works from the inside, and to get experience of working in a huge team.

Lecturers of the Faculty of Law also shared their impressions from participation in the International Legal Forum.

Polina Ryabinchuk, Head of the Legal Department at HSE in St. Petersburg, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Financial Law

The International Legal Forum can truly be called the most important and notable legal event of the year. Hundreds of professionals from all over the world come to discuss the most pressing legal problems, creating a consistent basis for the development of legal science and practice.

The panel discussions were especially interesting, since they aimed to find answers for the questions that are most relevant for St. Petersburg and other regions. They included the protection of cultural heritage sites and the management of investment and construction projects.

Anna Lapteva, Associate Professor at the Department of Financial Law

The programme of the international legal forum is very interesting and intense, in terms of discussing both practical and theoretical problems. It was useful to discuss the results of corporate law reform, its positive and negative sides, as well as the prospects for future reforms.