Moscow State University Law Faculty and PILnetTM in collaboration with global law firms DLA Piper LLP and White & Case LLC

are pleased to announce its second annual essay competition for Russian law students interested in participating in the Professional Responsibility and Ethics in the Global Legal Market training program.

This four-day program, which will take place at the MSU campus on 7 – 10 November 2012, is an intensive course structured as a series of presentations, panel discussions and interactive exercises and role-plays. The course will be taught by lawyers from the two aforementioned partner law firms, other legal practitioners, Verizon, Microsoft, and representatives from Moscow State University and Columbia Law School.

The course, which was first offered in November 2011 by the same group of organizations, received great responses from its participants. As one of the attending students pointed out, “[Through] this course I understood that legal ethics is not just beautiful words. [It is] really a great part of our profession. I think that you can’t be a lawyer without knowledge of professional ethics.”

The course will address a broad range of legal ethics and professional responsibility challenges present in any legal practice, both Russian and international. Topics to be discussed include regulation of the legal profession, proper screening and engagement of clients, conflicts of interest, confidentiality and disclosure, anti-corruption, issues particular to in-house lawyers, corporate social responsibility and pro bono, and the role of lawyers as officers of the court. The experience of large international law firms such as DLA Piper and White & Case with such topics forms the basis for the course’s content.

The instruction language is English.

Based on the essay competition, the selecting committee will select a group of at least 30 students to take part in the training program. The number of students from outside of Moscow may be limited by the program budget, however travel, accommodation and subsistence expenses for students coming from outside of Moscow will be compensated.

There is no fee for participating in this program.

To qualify for participation, the student must meet the following requirements:

Be in his or her 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th year of studies, or otherwise be a Masters student or a post-graduate student, in a state-accredited law school.

Possess strong command of the English language in order to be able to actively participate in the program (the level of applicant’s written English language skills will be assessed based on the submitted essay).

Demonstrate interest in the above topics in the submitted short essay.

Essays should be drafted in English, not exceed 10,000 characters (including spaces) and address some or all of the following questions in the context of the program’s theme as described above:

1. What does it mean, in your opinion, to be a responsible and ethical legal professional?

2. Do you think that all lawyers in Russia should be governed by special professional responsibility rules? Why or why not?

3. What are one or more examples of situations that represent a professional ethics issue/dilemma? Please describe and elaborate on each example rather than just list them.

4. What are the responsibilities of the legal professionals vis-à-vis society? Why do legal professionals have these responsibilities?

Students who participated in the 2011 training program are not eligible to qualify in this competition.

Any candidate whose essay is found by the selecting committee to contain incident(s) of plagiarism (i.e. use of existing works, written by other authors, without due reference to the source) will be automatically disqualified no matter of how good the rest of the essay may be.

The deadline for submitting the essays is 1 October 2012. Essays must be submitted electronically (in MS Word format), together with contact information and a scan of your student’s ID page indicating your current year of study, to the following address: moscow@pilnet.org. The selected students will be notified of the results no later than Monday, 15 October 2012.

Юридический факультет МГУ им. М.В. Ломоносова
PILnetTM, DLA Piper LLP и White & Case LLC

moscow@pilnet.org