The year of working from home

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A growing gig economy, automation, Brexit… the threats to UK employment were already growing. Then a global pandemic hit. As life is redrawn and rebuilt on a near-daily basis by Covid-19, employment lawyers are struggling to recontextualise existing laws while grappling with the ever-changing guidelines being churned out at dizzying speed. Kathryn Dooks, a partner …

Competition at a crossroads

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Mark Friend, partner and head of the London antitrust group at Allen & Overy, argues competition law in the UK is ‘currently at a crossroads’ and cites the current political climate and comments made by the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) former chairman, Lord Tyrie. ‘This crossroads is partly driven by Brexit, and what that …

Eye of the storm

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‘We are on the threshold of what is going to be the biggest restructuring challenge in the history of insolvency. Nothing will have come close’. So says Mark Phillips QC of South Square Chambers on the Corporate Governance and Insolvency Act 2020, passed in June 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 crisis. The legislation’s …

Mediations in an emergency

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It doesn’t need to be said that the current Covid-19 pandemic will have significant, lasting impacts on businesses. Parties negotiating contracts even a year ago could never have envisioned the situation in which they would now find themselves, and the resulting tangle of part-performance and non-performance is expected to significantly overburden courts around the world, …

Fit for purpose

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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?

Remote controls

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‘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 …

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.

Eye of the storm

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‘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.