"There are more small teams that need legal support," Roman Lukyanov from Semenov&Pevzner on the results of 2023

We continue to summarize the results of 2023 together with the gaming (or related to the gaming industry) teams. Next up is an interview with Roman Lukyanov, managing partner of the Semenov&Pevzner law firm.

What was the year like for the company? What have you done that I would like to highlight in terms of achievements?

The year turned out to be difficult, but successful. Generally speaking, the whole team was focused on consolidating and developing the initiatives that were launched in 2022.

First of all, it is working with new markets or at their junction (mainly China, South Korea, India, Brazil), developing expertise in legaltech. According to the latter, in particular, we worked a lot on our new side project Pirate Pay (a universal product for stopping IP threats in torrents), optimized the internal IT ecosystem.

We have launched multi-jurisdictional court projects, including those related to the gaming industry. This is a new and very interesting experience for the team. In addition, our office in Novosibirsk has been significantly strengthened with the arrival of a new head, Yulia Burenkova. Our professional life in Novosibirsk began to play with new colors.

The Serbian office also gained momentum this year and was actively involved in the team's projects. In other words, the year was good, and all the difficulties were mainly related to the optimization and adaptation of internal processes.

How has gaming legal practice changed this year?

In general, it seems that in comparison with 2022, everything has become somehow calmer. It seems that most market representatives have run out of the main fuss with relocation, debugging of payment routes, etc. (this does not mean that these issues have disappeared from the agenda, they just became fewer).

According to our observations, there are more small teams that require legal support (mainly business structuring, ensuring contractual binding of activities). There are more requests/questions about artificial intelligence. In addition, as the legislation (sanctions, on intellectual property, industry–related - on market regulation) continues to change, requests are coming related to this circumstance. By the way, taking into account these changes, there were also requests related to legislative tasks. There are, for obvious reasons, few of them, but they are there nonetheless.

What were the most popular appeals from gaming companies?

The main thing this year is everything related to transactions, sanctions compliance. Less often – requests for judicial claims work (debt collection, anti-piracy).

What are the company's plans for next year?

Our main goals are to gain a foothold in new markets (China, South Korea, Brazil). Work in this area has been carried out all year, there are very positive results, and we will develop them. There are specific plans (and the first steps to implement them) to launch new areas of the company's activities. As far as possible, we also expect to become more actively involved in the legislative processes related to the video game industry in Russia. And, of course, we will continue to develop our legaltech solutions (both in terms of improving functionality and promoting it on the market).