Guest post: Don’t abuse the Brexit litigants – their action shows we live in a free country

The law firm Mishcon de Reya is bringing an action to force the Prime Minister, whoever she (or just conceivably he) may be, to obtain parliamentary approval before issuing that all-important article 50 notification.

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IP UK

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.

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Guest post: The referendum now poses a serious threat to Parliamentary Sovereignty

Forget about the online petition. We do not have government by petition, particularly not when we don’t know how many of the online signatories are even British, or are duplicates, or computerised bots or in some other way bogus. No matter how many signatures the petition garners it will not result in a re-run of the referendum, and nor should it.

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Guest post from Herbert Smith Freehills – Brexit: After the vote

The ‘in-out’ referendum on the question of the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU) which has dominated the political and business agenda in the UK for the last six months, has resulted in a majority of voters (on a turnout of approximately 72%) preferring the UK to leave the EU.

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Guest post: US associate pay – welcome to the New Mediocre

‘New York To $190!’ was the long-running headline Above The Law printed frequently in more innocent and/or palmier days, with (we suppose) a combination of hope and bemusement. Well, Cravath’s pre-emptive strike of going to $180k didn’t quite get us there. Welcome to the New Normal – or the New Mediocre, the version I’m fond of because of its pith.

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Spain: A changing legal landscape

Garrigues’ Fernando Vives on the after-effects of the crisis.

Let’s take, as a starting premise, that the Spanish economy’s situation remains challenging: despite the European Commission forecasts, a shining 2.6% and 2.7% GDP growth in 2016 and 2017, Spain has yet to deal with an unemployment rate of around 20%. Clearly, we still have room to improve.

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Guest post: Why poor cross-selling sends the wrong message to clients

At the annual Legal Marketing Association conference in Austin, a vendor conducted a survey that asked attendees what their ‘highest-priority growth initiatives’ were for this year. The leading answer was ‘improve cross-selling.’ I don’t doubt the accuracy of the survey results; they are the conventional wisdom in the flesh.

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Middle Eastern resilience

JLegal’s Richard McLerie discusses the region’s legal market.

Over the past 12 months, the region has endured a period punctuated by numerous challenges, principle among which is arguably the depression in oil prices and the ongoing danger posed by militant groups destabilising significant areas of the region. The wider ramifications of these factors cannot be covered exhaustively here. However, of notable importance in the context of the legal market is how some of the more stable jurisdictions, notably that of the UAE, which continues to stand out as the hub from which firms operate their regional offering, have benefited from the migration of wealth into the more stable, internationally-underpinned markets from wider areas of the Middle East deemed, at least for the time being, unacceptably risky locations in which to invest.

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