Earlier this summer, I visited Russia on a reporting trip for a feature article in the upcoming August issue of The American Lawyer.

I used to write a lot about Russia, back in the days when it was a market international law firms actually wanted to talk about, and traveled to Moscow at least once a year.

But the boom years of the mid-noughties are now long gone, thanks to a crippling combination of severely depressed energy prices and harsh economic sanctions, imposed by the United States and Europe in response to the conflict in Ukraine.