Practice points

Increased workloads for law firms, partly due to the recent boom in M&A activity, are threatening to push up billing rates. This is a concern among corporate legal departments that understandably want to manage the costs of external legal advice. The annual Thomson Reuters Legal Department Operations report, based on responses from 1,500 corporate legal departments worldwide, showed that controlling outside legal costs was a top priority for 87% of respondents (the highest-ranked issue). This…

During the pandemic, the world has embraced technological change, and incidents of vishing, smishing and phishing have soared. UK Finance described the increase in fraud as a threat to national security, after it was revealed that £754m was stolen from bank customers during the first half of 2021. Fraudsters are no longer sending obviously rogue emails claiming to need money in exchange for some dubious get-rich-quick scheme in a far-flung country; those were by comparison…

Naomi Angell, a member of the Law Society’s Children’s Law sub committee, examines the impact the Ukraine war could have on international adoption In international conflict such as in Ukraine – when we are seeing the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War – children can become separated from their families and moved across borders. They may have been orphaned during the conflict or their orphanages destroyed. These children fleeing from war…

Naomi Angell, a member of the Law Society’s Children’s Law sub committee, examines the impact the Ukraine war can have on international surrogacy With war comes devastation and destruction and lack of hope for the future. No more so than for the many Ukrainian surrogates carrying a baby for a family overseas. These Ukrainian surrogates may be pregnant but unable to access medical care or give birth in safety, or they will be with a…

There are various intellectual property issues concerning cryptoassets including non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Many organisations are developing cryptoassets and wish to protect their IP. Copyright can apply to cryptoassets such as software used in fintech. Computer programs may be classed as literary works under sections 1 and 3(1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). However, caution is required when combining original software code with open source material. Licensing restrictions on open source material…

On 12 May 2021 Boris Johnson announced that there would be a public inquiry into the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. It will be the biggest, most complex and wide-ranging inquiry ever held in the UK, and it will present a number of challenges. In dealing with these issues, the chair and the rest of the inquiry team will bear in mind that the most important aspect of their task will be to identify…