Spring 2020 – The In-House Lawyer

If crisis elevates GCs, then 2020 will be an inflexion point for in-house counsel

Feature

New Law is as a breed still a lot better at promise than delivery, particularly on claims of providing better value than law firms.

Sivan Whiteley – Square

Feature

Sivan Whiteley’s legal career began with the study of rational choice theory at university – decoding why people make the decisions they make.

Fit for purpose

Feature

Mark McAteer, The In-House Lawyer: How has the role of the general counsel changed over the last five years and how will it be different in five years’ time?

‘How does an organisation maintain resilience when everything it designed and built was for a different way of working?’ asks DWF’s global head of data protection, privacy and cybersecurity, Stewart Room. As the world battles a pandemic, organisations around the globe are turning homes into offices and personal devices into office tools. The sudden change …

Continue reading “Remote controls”

Education, education, education

Feature

Julie Brannan, Solicitors Regulation Authority: It certainly is an important moment for the training of the profession, so it is sensible to start with a reminder of what it is all about. First, better assurance of high professional standards is at the heart of this. Protecting consumers of legal services by making sure everybody we …

Continue reading “Education, education, education”

The imagination gap

Feature

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.

Eye of the storm

Feature

‘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

Feature

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

Feature

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

Feature

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

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