Significant matters – Winter 2021

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BT to invest £2.7m into NI legal support hub Telecoms giant BT announced in December it is poised to commit £2.7m in investment to create a new legal support hub in Belfast that will house 30 commercial lawyer positions over the next four years.

In-house technology in Asia Pacific: risk aversion

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As the saying goes, ‘Ask a hundred lawyers and you’ll get a hundred answers’. Ask over a hundred lawyers about legal tech and the picture becomes even less clear. The legal tech ecosystem itself is so fragmented that almost no two GCs have the same thing in mind when talking about their use of technology.

Game of two halves

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‘This is my third lockdown at Latham,’ laughs Sam Newhouse, the M&A partner who left Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer a year ago for Latham & Watkins just as the coronavirus pandemic started to tighten its grip. The observation is poignant. In the Covid-19 world, we have all become used to delineating the passage of time in …

Julian Homerstone – Virgin Atlantic

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The transatlantic airline’s GC talks to The In-House Lawyer about what it takes to advise one of the world’s most high-profile carriers amid a global pandemic.

The shape of things to come

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While we all willed Covid-19 to merrily disappear at the stroke of midnight on 1 January, in 2021 we are still very much living in volatile and unpredictable times. Though tempered by vaccine rollout efforts, the convergence of Brexit and the pandemic has created the perfect storm for white-collar crime to rise in the UK, …

Leadership in law in crises requires a human touch

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General counsel and other senior in-house lawyers should not be afraid to show their human side when leading their teams through crises and seeking to deliver on business objectives, prominent figures in the legal market have agreed.

The gender agenda: the firms making progress on diversity

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‘Institutional male dominance is hard to shift – it isn’t enough to want to change; sometimes these things are structural,’ says Travers Smith disputes partner Caroline Edwards of the difficulties women lawyers can face trying to build their profile in the legal market and the directories that reflect it, including The Legal 500.

Compliance programmes – why it pays to be up to scratch | Steptoe & Johnson

Legal Briefing

While in-house lawyers were struggling during 2020 to deal remotely with the myriad commercial crises affecting their company, financial crime prosecutors globally were continuing to raise the bar on company compliance programmes – signalling repeatedly that any company seeking a reduced penalty or other form of leniency following a compliance incident would need to demonstrate …