The colour of money

Pressure for business to ‘go green’ has been building steadily for 20 years. What started as a minority concern has steadily moved up the corporate agenda, as governments impose incentives and penalties to support green policies, while an increasingly informed consumer base votes with their wallets.

Start-up snapshots

The In-House Lawyer profiles some of the start-ups bringing a fresh perspective to the legal tech industry     Daniel van Binsbergen, Lexoo, LB282, May 2018 Daniel van Binsbergen, Lexoo Apperio Founded: 2012 (as Legal Tender) Team size: 17 Investment raised: £3.4m Leaders: Chief executive Nicholas d’Adhemar Key clients: Dentons, Network Rail, Deliveroo, Octopus Investments …

The wheat from the chaff

In a quiet east London street off the bustling Brick Lane, a few doors from a sign tagged ‘Vegan Hair Salon’ is a co-working space. You meet Gaz, the office’s bulldog, and work among Star Wars figurines, gaming consoles and an electric drum kit.

Virtual fear and loathing

Clichés abound over the stereotypical contrast between stuffy lawyers and progressive tech start-up gurus. Clearly law firms – whose liberal and often misplaced use of the term ‘innovation’ often adds fuel to the fire – have plenty of work to do. At the same time, some clients are far more insistent on innovation from their …

Riding Schumpeter’s Gale

Storyteller. Ninja. Scrum Master. Brand Champion. Evangelist. The modern commercial world has created many new genres of work, but sometimes it’s hard to know what they mean. As the London School of Economics’ headline-grabbing anthropologist David Graeber once wrote, ‘It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of …

Brexit: counting down

To kick off the debate, Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) M&A partner Stephen Wilkinson introduced guest speaker Tom White, head of Europe at Global Counsel – who has over a decade of experience working for the UK Government primarily on EU single market negotiations – to give an overview of where the UK is, both in …

Commitment issues

Commitment. Marriage. Honeymoon. Divorce. Conversations about single-supplier legal advisory mandates are rife with relationship-strewn analogies. While no two arrangements are the same, most begin with a commitment from a company and its in-house legal team to reduce external legal spend and get a better handle on its multitude of legal connections.

Winds of change

Uncertainty seems to be the only thing lawyers working in Europe’s aviation sector can count on these days. The recent collapse of two established major European airlines demonstrated the volatility facing many sections of the industry, with UK-headquartered Monarch Airlines and Air Berlin becoming the latest casualties of turbulence. ‘Airlines are no longer seen as …

The justice brand

Alex Novarese, The In-House Lawyer: Will the UK legal system be more or less trusted post Brexit? Andy_Tyler_Photography_Legal_Business_Roundtable_08.02Abhijit Mukhopadhyay, Hinduja Group: As a business, we trust English law and the English courts. Whenever we do business in any part of the world, unless it is in the US, we always go for English law. So …