REUTERS | Dominic Ebenbichler
October 10, 2018

The wellbeing of future lawyers

Today is World Mental Health Day, which this year focuses on young people, giving us an opportunity to look at how young people fare in the legal profession.

At LawCare we believe you start “thinking like a lawyer” on the first day of your legal studies. Law is by nature competitive and adversarial, and the heavy workload begins when studying or training to be a lawyer. There are high levels of negative emotions within law: the work is often about winning or losing and requires legal professionals to be critical, judgmental, combative and aggressive. You are required to think pessimistically, looking for potential problems and worse-case scenarios. In addition, many law students and lawyers are perfectionists who fear failure and making mistakes. All of this can significantly affect mental health and wellbeing.

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REUTERS | Ognen Teofilovski
October 9, 2018

Next prepares for Brexit

Next, the retailer, released their half year results on 25 September 2018. A full eleven pages of that statement was devoted to their Brexit planning and it makes for fascinating reading. Even if clothing retail is not your sector, Next go into useful detail on what their risks and operational challenges are expected to be, how they are classifying them and how they intend to deal with them. They pose specific policy questions to the government on their post-Brexit choices and are clear on what is needed from government to improve their business planning.

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REUTERS | Mike Blake
October 8, 2018

Resilience techniques for lawyers

Why resilience training?

Resilience can mean the ability to bounce back from disruption, stress or change, or a dynamic process that involves a personal negotiation through life that fluctuates across time, life stage and context, as defined by psychologists Tusaie and Dyer. More than ever, resilience has become also a necessary part of being a lawyer.

When turning to managing your career as a lawyer, experts first advise lawyers to reflect on the challenges faced in working life. These might be the place of work, the environment of the workplace, balancing competing requirements in life with work, client or colleague expectations, or even perception of confidence or age, at any stage of professional life.

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REUTERS |
October 5, 2018

The Brexit ready in-house team: four steps to take today

The UK is (still) in a state of uncertainty about the precise impact of Brexit. But that shouldn’t stop in-house legal teams preparing themselves, indeed the more uncertain Brexit looks the more preparation is required.  A resilient and efficient in-house legal team will be a vital asset both for defending businesses against Brexit threats and supporting them to make the most of Brexit opportunities. But the work of preparing needs to start as early as possible.

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REUTERS | Navesh Chitrakar
October 2, 2018

Do I really need that boilerplate clause? Why?

When the business calls for shorter and more user-friendly contracts, how many lawyers think “I’ve always used this clause” and “Who knows what may happen if I stop using it”? But, where there’s a business need to reduce contract terms, we need a good business reason to include each clause, not just fear of an unidentified risk.

To help identify that risk, we reviewed 37 of the most common clauses in business-to-business contracts. We looked for the effect and value of each clause and the legal position without it, and published the results in a new practice note: Boilerplate: do I really need this clause and why?

As expected, we found some clauses that could easily be cut, and others that would be useful in most contracts.

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REUTERS | Andrew Winning
September 24, 2018

What’s on the agenda for in-house lawyers in October 2018?

Key items on the agenda for in-house lawyers this month include digesting the second tranche of no deal Brexit technical notices, the launch of a consultation on electronically executed documents, and a key decision on litigation privilege in internal investigations.

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REUTERS | Michaela Rehle
September 18, 2018

ICO regulatory sandbox: your chance to shape the privacy and innovation discussion

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently opened a consultation on the establishment of a regulatory sandbox. The idea draws inspiration from a similar scheme undertaken by the Financial Conduct Authority and was first proposed by the ICO in its Technology Strategy 2018-2021, published in March. The proposal foresees a “safe space where organisations are supported to develop the innovative products and services using personal data in innovative ways”. Continue reading →

REUTERS | Kacper Pempel
September 13, 2018

Contract life-cycle management (CLM) software: transforming in-house legal work

In the last few years, General Counsel ‘Barometers’ on legal management, technology trends and digital transformation have started to appear, assessing in-house responses to these key and overlapping issues. One of the areas they all focus on is contract life-cycle management (CLM) software, which is identified by Wolters Kluwer as “the most common type of work where legal teams use technology” and by EY as “transforming and vastly accelerating time-consuming detail work”.

Although the range of CLM software providers can seem bewildering (two recent reports by Forrester and Software Advice each identified over 20 different providers with remarkably little overlap) they can be segmented into three types.

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