Pinsent Masons, DLA Piper, Ashurst and Bird & Bird have all missed out on William Hill’s latest UK adviser panel, with Linklaters and Addleshaw Goddard the only firms to retain their places on the FTSE 250 bookmaker’s slimmed-down roster. (August 2017, legalbusiness.co.uk)
Continue reading “Behind the scenes of recent panel decisions”
Mention the word ‘Uber’ in any European capital city these days and chances are you’ll provoke some kind of emotional reaction. Uber is famous – infamous, some might say – for its revolutionary personal transport booking service, but the company is a major player in the personal food delivery business too, with more services to come.
Collaboration is cited as one of the key challenges facing business today. That challenge can be exacerbated for lawyers, due to the very nature of what they do. While humans are inherently social animals, we are just as likely to compete with one another when resources are scarce and conditions are dynamic or uncertain. For some, that could characterise the modern law firm!
Continue reading “Trusted adviser: the power of collaboration”
You wouldn’t normally mistake a lawyer for a designer. One is usually armed with a pen and a rulebook, the other with a Mac and a black turtleneck. Right?
Wrong.
Continue reading “Back to the drawing board – lawyers who think like designers”
Patent ‘trolls’, or non-practising entities, remain a thorn in the side of innovating companies in the US and abroad. But recent developments in both the courts and legislature are simultaneously attempting to deal with the issue – amounting to what could be a sea change for intellectual property law.
Palo Alto may conjure up images of unbridled wealth, hip workplaces and Tesla dealerships, but there is another side to Silicon Valley and its environs – that of East Palo Alto, with its underprivileged schools and one in four youths living in poverty.
Continue reading “Inspiring the next generation: not a moot point”
1998 seems like a lifetime ago, where global e-commerce was a futuristic fantasy for ordinary people just discovering the internet. Yet 1998 was year zero for the European Union’s Data Protection Directive – the basis for legislation protecting personal data across member states today.
Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of my time talking to GCs, in-house legal teams and partners in private practice, to ensure that what we are doing at The Legal 500 matches up to the needs of the market.
Lego, world famous makers of toy building bricks, declares that its mission is to ‘inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow’. It had this ethos front of mind when it began unveiling a state-of-the-art design concept for some of its major global offices.
Continue reading “The building blocks of working differently”
It’s a common refrain: law firms are not giving in-house teams what they want, in the way that they want it.
Amid the disruption of alternative providers and increasing automation of services, law firms should be listening closely to their clients. But, according to a recent report published by LexisNexis in collaboration with Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, many are not.