Saint Petersburg hosted the Interregional Conference on The Innovation Revolution in Legal Support Services for Corporations organized by Delovoy Peterburg newspaper in collaboration with Severnaya Stolitsa Innovations and Education Center. Irina Stepanova, a senior lawyer and head of intellectual property practice at EPAM, delivered her report.

A company’s commercial success is directly related to the level of its legal support. The accelerating momentum of business life changes the way corporate legal departments operate. The efficiency of legal work performed by in-house lawyers increasingly depends on their ability to use new technology and new methods of drafting documents, their prompt understanding of legislative novelties and flexibility in following procedures that govern relations with courts and regulators.
What are the state-of-the-art tools used today by the leaders in the legal profession? How can professionals make use of modern information technologies in legal work to the maximum effect? Heads of legal departments and managing partners of law firms, representatives of the judiciary, government authorities and academia, and professionals in information technologies all gathered in St Petersburg to exchange experiences and to search for new methods to increase the efficiency of legal departments. The three-day conference was set up in the form of reports sessions, roundtable discussions on liaison with the judiciary, supervisory and executive authorities and a workshop on new technologies in managing legal information and documents.

Irina Stepanova delivered a report on “Problems in Protection of Know-How Rights" focused on one of the most pressing problems in protecting intellectual property rights. Irina used specific examples to demonstrate problems in the current Russian know-how laws and the anticipated changes in Russian laws in this field.