Points on pre-packs: directors’ duties in an administration sale | Druces LLP

Legal Briefing

The High Court has ruled in a case regarding a director’s conduct in relation to an administration pre-pack sale. In Capital for Enterprise Fund A LP and Maven Capital Partners UK LLP v Bibby Financial Services Ltd [2015], the secured loan creditors claimed that they suffered loss as a result of one of the directors …

Antitrust treatment of online advertising markets | Shearman & Sterling

Legal Briefing

As online advertising continues its rapid growth, online ad revenues become an ever more important opportunity (and/or threat) for many TMT businesses. How these growing markets are treated by antitrust agencies can be critical to strategy – either in terms of M&A or defending business models from the actions of other market participants. This article …

Brave new worlds

Schadenfreude doesn’t feature much between in-house legal departments, so many general counsel would have winced when TalkTalk chief executive Baroness Harding admitted last year that she didn’t know all the technical details of the cyber breach that could ultimately cost the company £60m and contribute to the loss of 101,000 customers.

Myths and Millennials

Just what is it that you want to do? We wanna be free. We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. Loaded, Primal Scream It was a very different legal market in 2007 when Simon Harper and a group of colleagues at Berwin Leighton Paisner geared up for the launch of Lawyers On …

2016 and all that

Feature

‘One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. “Which road do I take?” she asked. “Where do you want to go?” was his response. “I don’t know,” Alice answered. “Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”’ Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland The above passage from …

Straight to the source

Twenty years ago the idea of any person instructing the Bar other than a private practice solicitor was frowned upon. Although as qualified solicitors in-house counsel always had the right to instruct barristers, convention dictated private practice lawyers acted as gatekeepers of the Bar for companies seeking advice on litigation. But, as the rules have …

Passion plays

Working long hours, expected to be available at all hours, and labelled a cost-centre. Such are the pressures of life in-house. The days of commerce and industry as a softer option for lawyers than the toil of the law firm associate track are rapidly drawing to a close.

Goodbye nine to five

In June 2014 the government extended flexible working rights to more than 20 million employees across the UK in a policy shift that recognised the traditional nine-to-five routine no longer dominates British workplaces. But if such attitudes are relatively new to much of the economy, lawyers in in-house roles – traditionally a more progressive environment …