About the Firm.

Pravo-300 · 8 years

Best Lawyers Russia

1,000+ matters

German Consulate — Trusted Adviser

The Firm · Est. 2009

The Firm

Vetrov & Partners is a boutique law firm based in Novosibirsk, Russia, advising domestic and international clients on complex commercial legal matters since 2009. The firm was built around a proposition that is simple to state and difficult to maintain: that every matter accepted by the firm should be led by a named partner, that the partner who appears at pitch should be the partner who runs the engagement, and that the firm should not accept a matter it cannot serve with the depth that matter requires.

That proposition has shaped every decision about the firm’s structure since its founding. It is why the firm has one managing partner and three senior lawyers leading practices — not fourteen. It is why the team has fifteen specialists — not fifty. It is why the client list contains names the firm can speak about frankly, rather than a list assembled to impress a directory reader. It is, in a sentence, why the firm is the size it is.

For foreign clients with Russian legal problems, the proposition has a specific implication: the partner who responds to your initial enquiry — within two hours, in English, from our Novosibirsk office — is the same person who will appear in the Russian court, draft the Russian submission, and call you after the hearing. That is not a standard arrangement in Russian legal practice. We think it should be.

How We Were Built

Recognition.

The firm has been listed in Pravo-300 — Russia's principal independent legal directory — every year since 2017. It is listed in Best Lawyers Russia and the Kommersant Legal Rating, and recognised by Delovoy Kvartal Novosibirsk as one of the leading law firms in the Novosibirsk market. The German Consulate General in Russia has included Vetrov & Partners among its list of trusted legal advisers (*Vertrauensanwälte*) — an independent endorsement that reflects the firm's suitability for foreign clients and overseas legal teams seeking Russian counsel.

The 1,000-matter threshold.

By 2026, Vetrov & Partners had handled more than 1,000 matters — a figure that includes commercial disputes that were resolved in a single hearing and shareholder conflicts that ran for eighteen months through three courts. The figure matters not because it signals volume, but because it signals range: the firm has seen how Russian commercial courts respond to asset-stripping defences in insolvency, how the IP Court distinguishes genuine trademark squatting from arguable parallel registration, and how the FNS constructs a fragmentation-of-business case — and it has been on the other side of each of those constructions enough times to know where the weak points are.

Growth through selectivity.

The firm's practice grew not by expanding its offer but by deepening it. Stanislav Lastovsky joined the firm and took charge of the restructuring, insolvency, and corporate governance practice. Kristina Kornouhova built the tax controversy and antitrust practice from a series of FNS audit instructions that other firms had declined as unpromising. Elizaveta Razina, who joined in 2012 and graduated from Novosibirsk State University in 2013, developed the IP enforcement practice into one that handles matters before the Intellectual Property Court as well as Rospatent and the Russian commercial courts.

The one managing partner and three senior lawyers leading practices are not an accident of the partnership's history — they are its architecture.

The founding.

Vitaliy Vetrov began practising law in Novosibirsk in 2001, two years before graduating from the Siberian University of Consumer Cooperation's Faculty of Law. By 2009, having spent nearly a decade taking on the commercial disputes that larger and more cautious firms declined — shareholder conflicts in two-participant LLCs, intellectual property disputes without obvious precedent, insolvency matters where the outcome was genuinely uncertain — he established Vetrov & Partners as a firm defined by the type of work it would take, rather than the type of work it would avoid.

The Limits of Our Practice

We are candid about what we do not do, because the alternative — presenting ourselves as capable of everything — produces worse outcomes for clients.

A matter that falls outside our practice is one where we cannot bring the depth of familiarity that the work deserves. Telling a prospective client this during the first call — rather than accepting the instruction and discovering the limitation later — is, we believe, the more honest and the more useful thing to do.

We do not take every matter.

Vetrov & Partners practises in Russia. Our office is in Novosibirsk. For matters that require local counsel in a foreign jurisdiction — whether because the governing law is not Russian, the dispute is before a foreign court, or local admission is required — we work with trusted counsel in the relevant jurisdiction and we disclose this clearly at the outset.

We do not have overseas offices.

Our insolvency practice is creditor-side exclusively. A firm that represents both debtors and creditors faces an inherent tension in the advice it gives. We have resolved that tension by choosing one side.

We do not represent debtors in insolvency proceedings.

If the assessment at the outset is that the realistic outcome range is narrow and the cost of achieving it is material, we say so — in the first conversation, not after six months of billing.

We do not engage in matters where our approach would be to manage the client's expectations downward throughout the engagement.

The matters we take are difficult. The advice we give is specific. We prefer to spend the words explaining the position than describing our commitment to excellence.

We do not use the language of the industry that obscures rather than communicates.

By the Numbers

Recognition

We are a Russian-qualified law firm. Our recognition is from Russian legal directories and business press. We do not hold rankings from Chambers Global or Legal 500.

The Partners

How We Work

"We do not take every matter. The ones we accept, we run with the depth a Magic Circle firm would apply — at boutique speed and mid-market economics."

This is not a positioning statement. It is a description of a constraint we have voluntarily accepted: the constraint of declining instructions that we cannot serve at the standard the work requires.

For foreign clients, the practical implication is simple. When Vetrov & Partners accepts an instruction, the partner who accepted it is the partner who runs it. Status updates are provided in writing after each material step — not on request. The first response to an initial enquiry arrives within two hours of receipt during business hours. We operate on UTC+7 (Novosibirsk Standard Time), which means we are at our desks when London opens.

For overseas law firms acting as lead counsel in matters with a Russian element, the implication is different but equally specific: we produce written outputs — opinions, submissions, witness statements — in English at the standard required for use in international arbitration and foreign court proceedings. We coordinate across procedural systems and we understand what international counsel need from Russian local counsel, because we have been providing it for fifteen years.

Make an Enquiry

Email: info@vetrovpartners.com
Phone (office): +7 (383) 310-38-76
Mobile / WA / TG: +7 (983) 510-38-76
Hours: Mon–Fri 09:00–20:00 · Sat 10:00–15:00 (UTC+7)

The first step — a short description of your matter — costs you three paragraphs and two minutes.