Anastasia talks about her work since graduating a year ago.
After completing my LLM at CCLS (Paris), I went back to Moscow to start work at EPA&P (Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners), the leading dispute resolution firm in Russia which is ranked highly by both Chambers & Partners and The Legal 500. I was happy that a degree from QMUL gave me a chance to make my dream come true and to practice arbitration in such firm.
It was interesting to find out that many of my colleagues obtained their LLM degrees abroad, and some of them also studied at QMUL. In March 2020 we held a seminar in our firm devoted to the best LLM programmes. I was delighted to share my personal experience and to talk about my favourite university.
I do believe that the LLM degree at QMUL changed my life completely. This experience gave me a good knowledge of arbitration and the essential skills to work as a lawyer. Moreover, it was a great contribution to my personal development. I became more open-minded and more flexible. It’s been a year already, but my best friends are still my friends from QMUL. We live in various countries and different time zones, but we share the same ideas and always support each other.
Apart from this, I still have some other links with QMUL. As a student, I started to write blog posts for Amicus Info about recent arbitration news. This year I became an editor so I provide support for the QMUL students. I love this project so much, and I think this is very useful for all young lawyers. Firstly, it helps you to improve your writing skills. The language of blog posts is slightly different from academic essays, and at work you will need to be knowledgeable in both styles. Secondly, at work I often need to do factual research for cases and to search for evidence, so my previous experience, which involved looking for articles on some particular subject, really helped me to enhance this skill.
I plan to continue my academic path. This spring I successfully passed the entrance exams and got an offer from the High School of Economics (specialising in public and private international law). I plan to continue the research I started at QMUL with the help of my supervisor Catherine Rogers and to write about third-party funding.