verdikt.r52.ru was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod legal agency "Verdikt" ("Verdict"), which operated in Nizhny Novgorod on Alekseyevskaya Street. According to its home page, the agency was "founded in 1997 by attorneys of the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Bar Association" and began with legal-entity registration services[1]. The same page gave its address — 603006, city of Nizhny Novgorod, Alekseyevskaya Street, building 30A, offices 4 and 5 — the phone number (8312) 33-58-83, fax 11-84-61, and two email addresses: verdikt@kis.ru and verdikt@r52.ru[1]. The head of the agency was named as Sergei Valentinovich Utkin[1]. The Wayback Machine holds snapshots of the home page from March 2001 to February 2014[5].

How the site was built

The surviving snapshot of the home page is dated 7 July 2007, but the page itself stated: "updated 25.07.2006"[1]. At the bottom was a short designer's credit — "design: AK"[1].

The home page was built around a menu of six sections, set in capital letters: "Legal Support for Business," "Establishment and Liquidation of Businesses," "Establishment of Non-Profit Organizations," "Obtaining Licenses, Permits, and Government Approvals," "Bankruptcy," and "Our General Approach to Pricing and Timelines"[1]. The most detailed was the second: registration of commercial organizations, sale of ready-made companies, share issuance, registration of amendments to founding documents and reorganization, registration of individual entrepreneurs without forming a legal entity, liquidation of organizations, companies with preferential taxation, registration of organizations in offshore zones and with foreign capital, and branches and representative offices[1]. In the first section, general legal assistance was joined by audit and accounting services, registration of real-estate transactions, trademark registration, and "the practical application of antitrust legislation"[1]. Separate items covered alcohol sales licensing and passenger transport licensing, as well as "stages and services of an insolvency administrator" in the bankruptcy section[1].

Regional legislation on the home page

A notable part of the home page was taken up by an "Attention!" block devoted to a Nizhny Novgorod regional law. It stated that new rules for licensing the sale of wine and spirits took effect on 1 January 2006, and that under Nizhny Novgorod Region Law No. 67-Z of 1 June 2005, only a legal entity with a paid-in charter capital of at least 500,000 rubles could apply for a license for wholesale and retail trade[1]. This block is the most substantive text on the surviving page: the rest amounted to a list of services and an appeal to the visitor.

The same block also gave the agency's own self-assessment, which cannot be verified from our materials: "Over the past 9 years, the Verdikt Legal Agency has ranked among the five largest law firms in Nizhny Novgorod"[1]. It also reported cooperation with attorneys, appraisers, patent specialists, and customs specialists[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the nn.ru directory of Nizhny Novgorod sites, "Verdikt" was listed in two categories at once under the "Firms (Enterprises)" branch — "Legal Services"[2] and "Miscellaneous Services"[3]. It was listed as "Verdikt Legal Services Agency" with the description "legal services from registration and maintenance to bankruptcy" — both misspellings remained in the directory as written[2]. Neighbors in the "Legal Services" category included, among others, the law firm "Sukhikh&Gorelik" and the Dzerzhinsk Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which also lived in the r52.ru zone[2].

Next to the listing in both categories, instead of a number there was "Rating: none"[2][3]: the site had no numeric position in Counter.nn.ru, and it does not appear in the surviving counter samples. In the published voting results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day for 2004, the agency is not mentioned either by domain or by name[4]. For a business site of this kind, that is an ordinary state of affairs: it existed as the firm's business card, not as a contender in the traffic contest — for more on the structure of the measured part of the local web, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

How it closed

The last snapshot of the home page in the Wayback Machine is dated 14 February 2014[5]. There are no later saved copies; exactly when the site stopped loading and what became of the agency itself cannot be established from the materials available to us. An indirect sign of decline is already visible in 2007: the snapshot was taken almost a year after the page's last update[1]. The fate is typical for the business segment of the early Nizhny Novgorod Internet: a price-list site in a departmental domain zone, a decade without a redesign — and disappearance without announcement.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Firms (Enterprises): Legal Services" category, 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Firms (Enterprises): Miscellaneous Services" category, 2002 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, 2004 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Snapshots of verdikt.r52.ru in the web archive, 2001 (archive)