‘I believe very strongly in leading by example,’ says Nokia global head of litigation Richard Vary. Although his legal team has a formal mentoring system in place, Vary maintains that it is the informal connections inherent in mentoring that play the most important role in developing in-house counsel. ‘You bring the people along, they see …
‘There’s a serious danger of a regulator trying to regulate something that it doesn’t understand,’ says Kingfisher group general counsel and company secretary Clare Wardle. Her comment comes as the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) works on another overhaul of its handbook, halfway through a two-year review that will end in 2017, a process that has …
Taken in isolation – and at £35bn, one of the largest oil and gas deals on record stands pretty well on its own – the acquisition of BG Group by Shell could be seen as a bellwether for a confident oil and gas market. But headline deals aside, the freefall in oil prices has had …
The UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) is a mature oil and gas basin. The collapse in global oil prices from a high of $115 per barrel in June 2014 to a price below $30 a barrel earlier this year has had a severe impact on the basin. Although according to Oil & Gas UK (OGUK) UKCS …
Continue reading “The oil price collapse – UK regulators to the rescue?”
I want to give you an overview of my theory about the inside counsel revolution. It is clear it has happened in the US. It is happening to a degree in Europe and in Asia. General counsel have become much more sophisticated, capable and influential, transforming law and business in two ways. Inside the company, …
IHL: What initiatives has Microsoft and its legal department pioneered to promote ethnic diversity? Mary Snapp: Microsoft’s legal department has had a focused diversity team for 12 years. Brad Smith [Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer] and I collaborated to start the diversity team within the department, which grew to include 85 people. Our original …
On 17 April, the government published a second consultation document on a new criminal offence that will apply to companies that fail to prevent the facilitation of tax evasion by those associated with it. The new offence is one of a number of new initiatives designed to tackle offshore tax evasion and corruption.
I’ve been advocating for some time that the ‘Trusted Adviser’ description of in-house counsel and GCs has the potential to encourage too much detachment between those lawyers and the organisations that employ them. While there must be some level of professional detachment, I encourage proactivity, dubbing this approach the ‘Ethical Champion’ − a style more …
As the campaigning continues for the forthcoming Referendum on whether the UK should leave the European Union (EU), immigration (and its links with national security) is one of the central topics in the debates. Aside from the headline grabbing national security concerns (‘Brexit could trigger World War Three warns David Cameron’ in the Mirror on …
Almost half of the FTSE 350 businesses surveyed regard cyber attacks as the biggest threat to their business when compared with other key risks. This statistic, taken from the government’s latest FTSE 350 Cyber Governance Health Check report published this May, suggests that the message that cyber and data issues are a business, rather than …