Today is Anti-Slavery Day, created in 2010 by a Private Member’s Bill introduced by former MP Anthony Steen CBE to raise awareness of modern slavery and to inspire government, business and individuals to eliminate it: an appropriate day to look at the first annual report from the UK’s Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Kevin Hyland OBE, published last week. Continue reading
On 28 September 2016 the FCA published a discussion paper (DP16/4) on whether the person who has overall responsibility for the legal function (the GC) at a bank, building society, credit union or PRA-designated investment firm (a Regulated Firm) should be a Senior Management Function (SMF) and therefore subject to the senior managers regime (SMR). If a GC is held to be an SMF, GC appointments at Regulated Firms would be subject to regulatory pre-approval, this including an assessment of fitness and propriety. Once approved, the GCs of Regulated Firms would also have to comply with additional conduct rules to those they are already subject to under the Solicitors Regulatory Authority, Bar Standards Board (or other local equivalents).
Earlier this week, economists Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström came close to a Nobel prize for law when the Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences awarded them the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (strictly speaking not a Nobel prize; Nobel’s will included only five prizes and this was not one of them) for their work on the theory of contracts.
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This time last week I chaired a live webinar discussion on the impact on organisations of increasing complexity in the regulatory environment, between Vicky Marissen, Managing Director of PACT European Affairs, and Daniel Greenberg, Counsel for Domestic Legislation in the House of Commons.
For those unable to join us live, a recording of the webinar, with accompanying slide presentation, can be found here. I’ve summarised some of the key takeaways in this blog.
This round-up summarises the employment-related developments that generated the most interest from in-house lawyers in the past three months, including the delay of the gender pay gap reporting regulations, the introduction of the illegal working offence and the implications of Brexit on employment law in the UK. It also highlights several key employment cases.
Key themes and developments on the agenda for businesses in October include a likely consultation on a proposed Criminal Finances Bill, an inquiry into corporate governance and new minimum wage rates.
Under the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s (SRA) new approach to continuing competence, from 1 November 2016 all solicitors will be required to plan their own learning and development activities to maintain or reach the necessary skill levels required to fulfil their professional roles to the standards expected. This replaces the old system that required solicitors to complete a minimum number of continuing professional development (CPD) hours each year.
The SRA yesterday published a brief update on the issues it is considering in light of the EU referendum.
The update confirms that there has been:
The issue of executive pay has increasingly been the subject of press coverage in 2016, particularly since the speech made by Theresa May before becoming Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative party in which she outlined her proposals to make changes to corporate governance, including executive pay.
Richard Moorhead recently drew my attention to a fascinating draft research paper from Robert Anderson and Jeffrey Manns, both associate professors at US law schools, on the drafting of US merger agreements.
The authors used computer textual analysis to review around 12,000 public merger agreements filed in the US over 20 years. They were able to construct ‘family trees’ around these agreements, tracing the precedents used for each deal and determining how those precedents had changed over time. Continue reading