Here’s a transaction that did the rounds some years ago.
If I wanted some foreign exchange in the future I could enter into a contract with a bank by which it would sell me some. Assume that, in order to get a bank to promise to give me $2bn in twelve months, I had to promise to give it £1.5bn in twelve months.
Continue reading “Guest post: Do companies have a duty to avoid taxes?”
There’s a fascinating article in the December issue of the Harvard Business Review that ought to be required reading for the leaders and owners of the world’s leading law firms. Called ‘Knowing When to Reinvent’, the essay describes what I think of as the Aetna Corporate Health Test, one that managing partners might start taking each year along with an annual physical.
Continue reading “Guest post: Knowing when to reinvent – the Aetna plan for business health”
What is a fair and equitable distribution of $7.3bn of global bankruptcy assets between multinational creditors where no legal mechanism exists? This is the unenviable question which the US and Canadian courts sought to answer by their joint rulings in the Nortel Bankruptcy in May 2015, and which the parties will be attempting to renegotiate when they commence further dispute resolution meetings today.
With the release last week of the Annual Report from Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, the ‘Big Three’ annual reports – Altman-Weil’s Law Firms in Transition, Citi/Hildebrandt’s Client Advisory, and Georgetown’s – are now all out and we can see what trends and developments they seem to discuss in common.
Continue reading “Guest post: Law land annual reports -has the partnership model been outgrown?”
Year-end is often seen, understandably if somewhat arbitrarily, as a time for reflection. Actually, in my book there’s never a bad time for reflection, so I’ll take an arbitrary peg over no peg.
Continue reading “Guest post: What’s your theory of the business?”
It has become commonplace – I have bowed to convention and endorsed the notion myself – to observe that law firms are labour not capital – intensive, and that (here’s the dangerous and subtle segue) therefore there would be no benefit to them in taking on outside investors, much less going public.
Unless you have been too busy reconciling your cheque book stubs against your monthly paper bank statements, you may have heard that the financial technology (fintech) sector is white hot right now.
The criminal courts charge is, or was, one of the less well thought-through criminal justice reforms of recent years. Since April this year, courts have had a duty under section 21A of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 to impose a fixed charge ‘in respect of relevant court costs’ on those convicted of offences.
Continue reading “Guest post: The strange, slow death of the criminal courts charge”
IBM Watson. Google’s driverless cars. Uncanny recommendations from Amazon, Siri, and Google Now. Not to mention the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award for 2015 going to Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots: Technology and the threat of a jobless future, summarised as:
Continue reading “Guest post: Artificial intelligence – the robots are/are not coming”
3 Verulam Buildings’ Gregory Mitchell QC and Alexia Knight on what lies ahead for banks
Banks have had a bruising few years. After litigation over bank charges and the payment protection insurance (PPI) scandal, very serious allegations surfaced, regarding the alleged mis-selling of interest rate hedging products (IRHPs) and, more recently, regulatory investigations on LIBOR and forex manipulation. This article considers some of the legal challenges for banks as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) review closes.
