Our People Are Our Everything: Training And Development Of Digital Economy And Cybersecurity Regulation Specialists

KEY CONCLUSIONS

Numerous innovations are taking place in law, and lawyers need to have a flexible response to them

“In order to effectively solve problems for which there are no ready-made solutions either in textbooks, in ConsultantPlus, or somewhere on the Internet, it is crucial to have the fundamental knowledge that is needed to do it quickly,” said Alexander Savelyev, Academic Supervisor of the ‘Digital Law’ Educational Programme at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.

“At present, we are only in the stage of creating new tools and new concepts. It still hasn’t settled into any final direction. We use the concepts of ‘digital law’ and ‘digital lawyer’ more like jargon in order to quickly get to the point,” MTS Vice President for Government Relations Ruslan Ibragimov said.

“Law has come to encompass a lot of interesting things. It’s a serious challenge to law that can only be met on the basis of one thing: we must force lawyers to speak the same language, and this language must be Roman law. Today, we need to modify it, but we must not lead everything to another area under any circumstances,” said Elina Sidorenko, General Director of the Platform for Working with Entrepreneurs’ Enquiries and Director of the Centre for Digital Economy and Financial Innovation at MGIMO University.

Lawyers are becoming more interested in digitalization

“Processes are being automated. [We are seeing the] automation of processes, both state processes and those that directly take place within companies,” said Alexander Zhuravlev, Chairman of the Commission for Legal Regulation of Ensuring the Digital Economy at the Association of Lawyers of Russia and Co-Founder of the Moscow Digital School.

“While our colleagues around the world are discussing the definition of ‘digital lawyer’, what it is, and who they are, others are already using them. We have already noticed a shortage of these lawyers while we were defining the definition,” said Maxim Inozemtsev, Editor-in-Chief of Digital Law Journal and Head of the Department of Dissertation Councils at Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

PROBLEMS

Reluctance to digitalize the law

“Today, numerous traditional lawyers are not even prepared for the most basic thing: to acknowledge the lack of a particular legal fact in the digital sphere that is being forced to alter legal relations,” said Elina Sidorenko, General Director of the Platform for Working with Entrepreneurs’ Enquiries and Director of the Centre for Digital Economy and Financial Innovation at MGIMO University.

“To date, it seems as if there hasn’t been any conceptual understanding that there is a digital content of law,” said Oleg Zaitsev, Dean of Higher School of Jurisprudence Department at the Institute of Public Administration and Civil Service of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA).

Lack of a unified approach to training specialists in digital law

“We have yet to agree on the main fundamental categories that lawyers should offer us today specifically. It’s either the preservation of the old law and its adaptability to modern technologies, in which case we can figuratively train traditional lawyers and work them in the necessary sphere, in the best sense of the word, or we must prepare a fundamentally new category of lawyers who are forced to and will have to serve the digital economy,” said Elina Sidorenko, General Director of the Platform for Working with Entrepreneurs’ Enquiries and Director of the Centre for Digital Economy and Financial Innovation at MGIMO University.

“We don’t have such a global fundamental approach yet. We teach law whose name we are still unable to sort out. We have two schools and two different names for this programme: one person offers information law, another offers digital law, another offers digital technology law, another offers the basics of the digital economy, and so on. This is a massive number of very different variations of courses,” Russian Federal Bar Association Vice President Elena Avakyan said.

SOLUTIONS

The state, universities, and business need to work together to train lawyers

“The government should be in charge of this. Ask business what new expertise is needed now, and train the specialists who will help entrepreneurs in a rapidly changing world [...] We have united everyone who works in digital law and technological entrepreneurship as well as the universities at Skolkovo and RANEPA that are seriously involved in this topic, and have taken major IT companies and entrepreneurs who are now taking large grants for import substitution. They can say what personnel they need now. And, of course, this also applies to digital lawyers [...] We need to see in practice what steps need to be taken now. Perhaps we should start with Moscow. Let’s run this pilot in the capital and test support programmes,” Commissioner for Entrepreneurs' Rights Protection in Moscow Tatyana Mineeva said.

“It is essential to create a culture of continuous training for judges, prosecutors, and others involved in law enforcement. Because if this is not done, the result that we expect from the law [...] will not happen,” said Alexander Zhuravlev, Chairman of the Commission for Legal Regulation of Ensuring the Digital Economy at the Association of Lawyers of Russia and Co-Founder of the Moscow Digital School.

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