This week, a colleague shared with me a new white paper entitled Artificial Intelligence in Law: The State of Play 2016 by Michael Mills of Neota Logic. The paper looks at how artificial intelligence (AI) is being implemented right now in areas such as legal research, compliance, contract analysis, case prediction, and document automation.
Key developments on the agenda for businesses in April 2016 include the introduction of the PSC register and the national living wage, and the adoption of a new directive on trade secrets. The adoption of the new General Data Protection Regulation is now not expected until the summer.
We had a great couple of days last week at the GC Leadership Forum, which I chaired for Practical Law. I’d like to say a huge thank you to the excellent speakers and to everyone at the Forum who contributed to some fascinating discussions and debates.
One of the highlights for me was the keynote speech by Will Hutton, chair of the Big Innovation Centre and Principal of Hertford College Oxford, on what he described as the new age of turbulence.
When Practical Law began, more than 20 years ago, we had a simple mission that still holds firm today: to demystify the law and bring practical law to companies. A key part of that mission is striving to write as simply as we can, using plain English. When we took our standard documents to China, we found that our international customers were just as drawn to the fact that they were presented in simple, easily translatable English, as they were to the choice of English law or the jurisdiction of the English courts.
The Financial List was established in October 2015 as a single specialist list comprised of judges drawn from both the Commercial Court and the Chancery Division, with particular expertise and experience in financial markets disputes. The procedure for cases assigned to the List is governed by CPR 63A, the associated Practice Direction, and a Guide issued on 1 October 2015.
Key developments on the agenda for businesses in March 2016 include the publication of gender pay gap regulations, the start of modern slavery reporting and the UK Budget.
Outside the narrow world of those few of us who work as specialist advisors to companies and institutions on labour and human rights, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) have not had an enormous impact on broader legal practice; neither in terms of awareness, nor implementation. This will change significantly in the UK in the coming year, predominantly because of the impact of section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 (MSA).
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has recently published its response to the news that political agreement has been reached on a new EU-US Privacy Shield to replace the Safe Harbor.
Most of what the ICO has to say will no longer be news to those that are following developments in the field closely, but the tone is calm, clear and reassuring, and this blog post provides a useful summary of where we are now in relation to the Safe Harbor.
I was delighted to hear that our feature article in this month’s PLC Magazine has already attracted a lot of attention. Cyber security issues need to be placed on the board agenda sooner rather than later, and before a cyber breach occurs, not as a result of one. For further information, see our practice page.
Last week Thomson Reuters hosted a seminar entitled Modern Slavery, Bribery and Corruption: Corporate Compliance with Legal Frameworks which coincided with the publication of two reports on the connection between modern Slavery and corruption from Verité and Liberty Asia.
An eminent panel including Nick Grono, CEO of the Freedom Fund, Dan Viederman, CEO of Verité, Duncan Jepson , CEO of Liberty Asia, Martina Vandenberg, Founder and President of the Human Trafficking Pro Bono Legal Center and Mike Harris from World-Check discussed the findings of these reports and answered questions from a varied audience of in-house, legal and risk officers and academics.