All articles by Polly Botsford
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OpinionBOOK REVIEW: Media Law & Ethics in the 21st Century
This collection of essays will engage you in the debate over press regulation and free expression.
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Why government reforms on employment law make little sense
There were some statistics that private equity pioneer Adrian Beecroft did not include in his highly controversial report on employment law published last year. The number of claims brought by employees in employment tribunals fell from 236,000 in 2009-10 to 186,000 in 2011-12. The number of claims for both sex ...
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Aftermath of panel reviews
It is said that there are more questions on the application form to be a member of a lender’s conveyancing panel than there are to join MI5. Whether or not that is true, it is clear that if you want to do a good job for your homebuying clients, and ...
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Arbitrary decisions
Picture this: an international arbitration, millions of dollars at stake; an expert is called to give evidence on damages right at the end of the hearing. This is what he says happened: ‘Everyone had flown miles to come to the arbitration. I was the last witness. One of the counsel ...
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Drifting eastwards: becoming multi-jurisdictional
If Woodward and Bernstein were advised to ‘follow the money’, law firms follow the client. Firms that operate in offshore financial centres have done exactly that. As offshore clients have pulled back from structured finance transactions towards risk-transfer arrangements, so have their lawyers. And where ...
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Offshore law firms are reinventing themselves
No man is an island - as we all know from the poet, John Donne; which is why global offshore financial centres such as those in Bermuda and the Channel Islands have felt the effects of the recession as much, if not more, than their onshore counterparts. But it is ...
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Lawyers are taking stock in preparation for PII
This year, renewal is about what is not happening in the professional indemnity insurance market - this is not the year that the assigned risks pool is closed down, nor the year that the renewal date will change, and the impact of alternative business structures has yet to be felt. ...
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The increasing world of regulation and compliance
In a secret location in the UK, there is a warehouse the size of a football pitch that climbs five storeys into the sky. Under its gargantuan roof are more than three million boxes and, in these boxes, are thousands and thousands of files and innumerable documents.
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Forecasting the creative impact of alternative business structures on law
The challenge of alternative business structures (ABSs) appears to have given fresh legs to a neologism. Lawyers should be ‘pessoptimistic’ – that is, in a state of contradiction, living with both dread and a sense of opportunity. A pessoptimist (the word was coined by Palestinian ...
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Businesses should not pause despite Bribery Act delay
According to a recent story in the South China Morning Post, the best gift you can give to a public official in China is not an iPad, it is not even a precious jewel. The favourite gift at the moment is a rather unprepossessing pre-paid ...
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Are shared services a panacea for local authority spending cuts?
There is a road in one English town that falls between two boroughs – the boundary between them is an imaginary line down the middle of the road. Each borough has its own waste-management contract. On two different mornings, a truck from each borough goes down its half of the ...
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How the south-west legal market is battling recession
The south-west’s economy has recently brightened after the gloom of the recession, recording a rise in the Business Activity Index at the end of the summer from 52.8 to 54.1. This is good news for the large, commercial firms in the region, which confirm that their own numbers have improved ...
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How Leeds law firms are battling the downturn
Times have been challenging for almost everyone in the Leeds legal market: from Fox Hayes, which went into administration last year, to members of the original ‘big six’ Leeds firms such as Hammonds, which made over 70 redundancies and had to close its conveyancing business, Hammonds Direct; to Lupton Fawcett ...
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Birmingham's legal sector unites to battle effects of recession
They may not have much else in common with the Liberal Democrats, but Simmons & Simmons and Birmingham-based firm Shakespeare Putsman know the value of power sharing. They are both looking to a coalition – if that’s the right word – with Mayer Brown and Needham & James respectively. Consolidation ...
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The World Cup offers opportunities for lawyers and solicitor-agents
‘Feel it! It is here!’ runs the unofficial slogan, but it would be hard to miss a football World Cup, the most watched sporting event on the planet, which is beamed to two billion TVs. Among its devotees are sports lawyers, who seize on this quadrennial opportunity to make themselves ...
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Manchester's legal sector has rallied following recent market turbulence
It’s officially all smiles in Manchester: the city has the highest level of happiness in the country, according to the UK Competitiveness Index 2010. And, in terms of actual competitiveness, it is ranked 13th overall, and the third most competitive ‘large city’. After a difficult couple of years, the city’s ...
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Does the Coroners and Justice Bill go far enough - and is there enough money
In Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, the coroner’s court is in the back room of a pub, the Sol’s Arms (geddit?). The coroner is drunk and the inquest is held – and a verdict dispensed – while a game of skittles rattles in the background. Of course, this is Dickens at ...
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Despite the recession Birmingham continues to attract new talent
One-time workshop of the world, today a metropolis renowned for its diversity and commercial nous, Birmingham has grown accustomed to reinventing itself. Since the early 1990s, England’s second city has been in a long regeneration phase. And although the recession has hit it hard, major development projects are keeping Brummies’ ...