Ekaterina Sizova, a lawyer at EPAM attended the roundtable discussion on the subject of Protecting Your Reputation: Current Issues, Challenges and Prospects, organized by RBC media holding on October 14 in Saint Petersburg.

There have been an increasing number of claims for protection of business reputation in recent years, however, according to industry experts, this area of practice requires improvements.

The discussion provided an opportunity for participants to share their professional experience and review the standards for code of conduct in business community. The discussion, which was joined by experts from leading law and consultancy firms and news media reporters from the North-West region, was focused on topics such as:

• Comparison of Russian and non-Russian laws, and ways of improving Russian laws.
• Protecting business reputation in a time of “digital revolution”. Changes in legal practice as a result of development of Internet media.
• Court action strategies for plaintiffs and defendants.

During her speech, Ekaterina discussed the specifics of protecting business reputation in the course of discrediting information being published on the Internet, and used some actual precedents to demonstrate this. Ekaterina noted that despite certain gaps in law and difficulty of indentifying a proper defendant when discrediting information is published on the Internet, protection of one’s business reputation and good name is still feasible.