Features – Page 2 – The In-House Lawyer

The imagination gap

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Rising temperatures and sea levels, shrinking ice sheets and sea ice, extreme weather events. They’re all mainstays of today’s news cycles with a worrying – and growing – frequency.

‘Insurers are trying to remain profitable in a hard environment – it’s still a difficult and competitive market,’ notes Katherine Coates, head of insurance at Clifford Chance (CC), assessing the UK insurance industry a few days before the coronavirus outbreak was classed as a global emergency.

Reputation preserved

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Specialist lawyers, covering areas such as trade mark protection and enforcement as well as advertising and marketing, have had a role to play in shaping the success of some of the biggest global consumer brands.

Chicken run

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In an exclusive extract from her new book You Didn’t Mention The Piranhas, Sarah Nelson Smith writes candidly about how it feels to be in the middle of a PR crisis:

Scrum time

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Business is full of buzzwords, and among the buzziest of the last few years is ‘agile’.

Risk management survey 2020 – Crooked timber

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Sponsored by Marsh. The ongoing #MeToo saga within in the legal profession was only a few chapters old last year when our annual risk and professional indemnity report with broker Marsh went to press. Fast forward a year and law firm risk managers and general counsel are faced with a harsher environment to navigate on …

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Outsourcing legal teams – Will it ever be more than flavour of the month?

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It’s not often a FTSE 100 GC and a law firm offer themselves up to the media to discuss a deal. Even panel review stories rarely elicit comment beyond a few contrived lines about ‘innovation’, ‘alignment’ and ‘deeper relationships’. So when BT legal chief Sabine Chalmers and DWF arranged conference calls in the summer to …

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Significant matters – Winter 2020

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National Grid drops three from panel BDB Pitmans, Irwin Mitchell and Norton Rose Fulbright have been dropped from National Grid’s panel, understood to be worth about £12m a year in the UK. Womble Bond Dickinson is the sole new appointee on a roster that reduced the number of advisers from 12 to ten. Addleshaw Goddard, …

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The BT interview – ideas from the bath

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The In-House Lawyer (IHL): Eighteen months in the group general counsel role, what have been some of the key projects you’ve been doing since you landed? The wider business has been through a lot of transformation, how is legal keeping up? Sabine Chalmers (SC), group GC, BT: When I joined Gavin Patterson was my boss. …

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The greater good

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Matthew Scully, Clifford Chance: There are two things that I wanted to touch on: first, whether there is such a thing as a good culture – I would say there is no one good corporate culture for all businesses but there are perhaps some basic common features – and, second, the notion of ‘tone from …

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Overview

The Legal 500 invites the best in-house counsel and GCs from some of Spain’s most prominent companies to the GC Summit Spain.

Through comprehensive panel discussions, Q&A sessions and the opportunity to meet and engage with fellow in-house and private practice legal luminaries, attendees will be able to hone their understanding of some of the major issues affecting them and the profession as a whole, and discuss these with their contemporaries. Put simply, the GC Summit Spain promises not only to be interesting and insightful, but also an event that will provide practical, tangible benefits to attendees.

The day’s panel discussions will see topics addressed and dissected by legal experts across four panels. Firstly, trademark and anti-counterfeiting efforts will be analysed, before the already-present but ever-growing challenge of cyber security will be unpacked. After this, collective actions and related recovery efforts will receive the attentions of an extremely well-qualified panel. The final panel is still to be confirmed, but also promises to be an engaging and insightful discussion.

These panels are specifically designed to give the audience the right knowledge to handle the challenges and opportunities presented by the corporate legal sector with the best legal strategies designed by experts of the most successful companies in the country.

Agenda

GC Summit Spain

1.15pm

Registration and light lunch

2.00pm

Opening remarks

2.15pm

Best practice benchmarks for trademarks and
anti-counterfeitingSafeguarding the intellectual property of their businesses is the foremost concern for many in-house counsel, particularly those at consumer goods companies with strong – and often-pirated – brands. The only way to ensure a successful response to these threats is through enacting a proactive strategy underpinned by robust internal processes. This panel will examine how to go about organizing in-house legal functions to protect their companies’ trademarked goods and intellectual property in the most effective way.

3.10pm

Cyber Security

There is scarcely a business functioning that does not consider cyber security threats to be a major concern. For large corporate entities, who often hold vast amounts of customer data on record, the risks are correspondingly larger and will undoubtedly assume greater importance for in-house legal operators as time goes on. How to best approach cyber security issues will be a matter for each individual company as best practices are honed over time, but this expert panel use their vast experience to analyse some of the major considerations for in-house counsel looking to safeguard their companies.

4.00pm

Coffee Break

4.15pm

Collective actions: maximising recovery opportunities

Collective actions can cause major losses to a company if the issue is not foreseen or mitigated against, or if recovery efforts are unsuccessful. Despite this, many in-house counsel are unfamiliar with these procedures and run the risk of failing to protect their companies when such a threat develops. This panel will provide practical insight into this less-understood aspect of corporate safeguarding.

5.10pm

Dispute Resolution

This panel will outline effective dispute resolution mechanisms, providing insight on a number of perennial questions for in-house counsel faced with a dispute process: Court or Arbitration? When and how to get management and commercial teams on board, and when to seek the advice of external counsel? All these questions and more will be the focus of this expert panel discussion.

6.00pm

Closing remarks

6.10pm

Drinks and canapes

Speakers

David R Scott, Managing partner, Scott & Scott

Vicente Marot, Partner, Andersen Tax & Legal

María González Gordon, IP & Digital Business Partner, CMS

GC Summer Reception UK 2021

6.30pm

Arrival and welcome drinks

7.15pm

Speeches

7.30pm

Drinks and networking

10.00pm

Event concludes

GC Powerlist: Denmark 2021

4.00pm

Arrival and welcome drinks

4.45pm

Speeches

5.00pm

Networking with drinks and canapes

7.00pm

Event concludes