Legal Business

IP UK

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Brexit Cogence Search
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Brexit and the outlook for sports law

Sport is a multibillion-dollar global industry on a permanent growth trend. Football, that opiate of the masses, is the fastest growing sector of all. The European football market, says Deloitte, will exceed €25bn by 2017. While we may gasp at FC Barcelona’s record-breaking £120m-a-year deal with Nike, and at the fact that Sky and BT paid £5.1bn for three seasons’ worth of TV rights for the beautiful game, we know next year there will be another, bigger deal and more companies vying for opportunities to promote themselves across the world. For every sport there is a new record to be broken both on and off the field.

Legal Business

‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’

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Litigation Cogence Search
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Cogence Search’s Mark Husband on London litigation.

TripAdvisor has declared London the ‘number one destination on Earth’ for 2016, beating Paris, New York and Rome for the honour. For international corporates, London is an attractive jurisdiction in which to litigate or arbitrate disputes, offering quality legal services as well as a multinational/multilingual talent pool, a variety of funders and funding options, top-tier hotels and cultural attractions.

Legal Business

Cost reduction = quality reduction

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Comment Cogence Search
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Cogence Search’s Mark Husband on the fallacy of cheap legal services

The respected legal commentator (and fan of mammals) Bruce MacEwen recently commented: ‘Of course, while hedgehogs know one big thing – that BigLaw hasn’t changed and hasn’t needed to so far – foxes know many things.

For example: a) 95% of the work on that indispensable “international M&A” deal consists of due diligence scutwork suitable for the skills of any conscientious team of $25/hour freelancers; b) IBM’s Watson is fast approaching the ability to understand language in context, and did we mention it has Moore’s Law on its side?; and c) pricing and efficiency pressure is actually not coming from the GCs [general counsel] and law departments of clients but from the CFOs [chief financial officers] and finance departments, who don’t give a fig about our noble profession and don’t consider it their problem to ensure the profitability, or even the existence, of the Global 50.’