Delegates at the International Bar Association (IBA) meeting on corruption in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) area denounced lawyers from the region and called for Western lawyers to be wary about working there.
The audience was told that a high proportion of companies in Russia were connected to the mafia and foreign law firms should "treat Russian lawyers with caution", according to Stephen Borneman, a barrister and industrial consultant from Vienna.
Borneman said corruption was "endemic" in Russia and work advising on a privatisation could involve unwittingly helping to launder money. He estimated that £31.25bn has been laundered in Russia through privatisation in the last 10 years.
Borneman also called for Western lawyers to aid Russia in developing anti-corruption practices. The call comes after the recent Bank of New York's money-laundering scandal.
Joseph Jones, from the US Justice Department, said: "The biggest problem is that these countries have no investigative techniques."
But he added that there were also concerns about giving regulators information about companies as these too were open to corruption.
Jones identified Bulgaria as the world's capital for intellectual property crime and said the country was the leading producer of pirated video and audio tapes.
Albania was described as the most corrupt country in the entire region, based on a World Trade Organisation anecdotal evidence study.
In the survey, Albania, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia and Russia were described as the leading corrupt nations in and around the CIS region, while Hungary, Slovenia and Poland were seen as the least.
The primary reason, according to the report, is countries such as Hungary have the most developed investigative techniques, while countries such as Albania have none.
Borneman added that foreign law firms should take the power of organised crime in the CIS region seriously. He said, in Russia, there were over 335,000 organised crimes documented in 1992 alone.
He pointed out that although the mafia was involved in crimes such as prostitution and drug running, white-collar crime was the most profitable.
Criminals in this sector regularly used the threat of assassination to make sure they collected their "contribution" from companies in the region.
One delegate brought the message home to delegates when he said the president of the Albanian Bar had been gunned down earlier this year by what is thought to be an organised crime ring.