Inara Blagopoluchnaya

Inara Blagopoluchnaya is our exclusively recommended Capital Markets Law expert in the Russian Federation on the Advisory Excellence website. If you need assistance in this area, please contact Inara directly using the contact details listed above.

Inara focuses on corporate finance transactions, including debt and equity offerings, and mergers and acquisitions, private equity and joint venture transactions.

She also has practiced law in Skadden’s New York office, advising United States companies and other clients on a number of financings and investments.

Firm Overview:

Founded by Marshall Skadden, Les Arps and John Slate on April Fools’ Day in 1948, Skadden began as a scrappy upstart among a sea of established “white shoe” law firms in New York. Joe Flom was hired as the firm’s first associate later that year, and litigator Bill Meagher, the fifth partner to lend his name to the firm’s letterhead as it appears today, joined in 1959.

Our first two decades were marked by slow and steady growth of our client base as we set out to establish ourselves as the go-to firm for our clients’ most complex legal problems. Our willingness to handle proxy fights in the 1950s and early 1960s — matters deemed “ungentlemanly” by white shoe firms — positioned us to ultimately become the firm of choice for the hostile takeovers that dominated the M&A landscape beginning in the 1970s.

Recognising the value of providing full-service advice to clients, from day one we sought to develop a range of complementary practices, like litigation, tax and antitrust. Client needs led us to open offices in other cities beginning in 1973, and the volume of work we were handling fuelled exponential growth in the number of attorneys at the firm in the 1980s.

That growth included a significant expansion of the practices we offered to clients, including restructuring, finance, real estate, mass torts and securities litigation, as well as the opening of offices in Europe and Asia.