“I’ve always been really fascinated by businesses, understanding how they work and the people behind their strategies,” says Sidley Austin managing associate Cyril Cutinha. Getting involved with and exploring businesses is something that Cutinha had enjoyed whilst studying law at university — so perhaps it’s no surprise that he has gone to combine his legal knowledge and passion for business in the Private Equity (PE) team at the London office of the global law firm.

He describes the firm’s commitment to providing its PE clients, who are some of the biggest and most frequent deal-makers in the world, with a comprehensive service tailored to their businesses as one of the drivers for the firm’s success. “The firm has built on its broad PE platform and strategically invested in specialist areas to provide added value to its clients in a competitive legal market,” Cutinha explains, highlighting the firm’s investment in practice areas such as insurance, life sciences and sports, which has helped the firm secure business that mirror the interests of its clients.

To provide this ‘one-stop shop’ for PE firms, having a global network is key. Cutinha proved this by nonchalantly scrolling through his emails and noting the various cities that they had been sent from: “LA, Chicago, Brussels, Munich, Hong Kong…” During his training contract, he even got to spend six months out in Hong Kong to sample some of Sidley’s international work beyond the City.

So, what’s the work like? “It’s fast-paced and you work collaboratively with a wide range of people from different cultures and backgrounds who share the trait of being highly-motivated and intelligent,” says Cutinha. His work includes advising PE sponsors on either side of buyouts, assisting sponsors with the growth and development of their existing portfolio companies and restructuring stressed and distressed businesses. “Your job is to understand your client’s aims and get under the skin of the relevant business to help them shape their views on the opportunities and risks presented by the transaction they are trying to implement and come up with creative solutions,” he tells me.

“Understanding who your client is and what they want is essential to being a great deals lawyer,” stresses Cutinha. Effective communication and organisation, as well as an ability to bring people together are also key skills according to the Sidley lawyer who adds that the volume of deals you experience at the firm allows you to quickly develop a sixth sense for the problems your client may encounter.

The UK M&A market has faced significant challenges in 2022 with heightened geo-political risk and macroeconomic tensions, Cutinha explains. The war in Ukraine, rising inflation and political instability in the UK were amongst the key factors that made PE firms think twice about executing acquisitions and disposals in the short-term.

That said, Cutinha has remained busy with plenty of deals in the tech sector. PE clients he has worked with in just the past six months include Clearlake Capital, who co-own Chelsea F.C., EQT, H.I.G. Capital and KKR & Co.

So, what should students be doing if they want to grab the opportunity to work with these stellar clients at a firm like Sidley Austin?

Cutinha encourages aspiring lawyers to “talk to as many people as possible if you get the opportunity to participate in an open day or a vacation scheme and ask them what they love about their job and what experience helped them get to where they are” and “think hard about how you can leverage your own personal experiences to show that you would make a great lawyer”.

Enthusiasm and drive are important qualities. “The firm sees you as an investment, so we really want to see your enthusiasm and willingness to learn,” he says. “I’d encourage applicants to be authentic and show us what you’re interested in, why you are here and what you’d like to achieve.”

As for developing your commercial awareness, Cutinha advises students to “dig deeper into sectors they are genuinely interested in — be it fashion, sport or whatever else sparks their interest — PE is so pervasive that you’ll be hard pressed to find sectors of interest that PE firms do not touch!”

Follow @SidleyLaw

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Law firms Shearman & Sterling and Hogan Lovells have not denied that they are in merger talks, sparking speculation that a tie-up may be on the cards.

Shearman held a senior equity partner meeting in London on “something transformative” earlier in December, according to unnamed sources quoted by The Lawyer, with some indicating a vote on a potential tie-up could take place as early as 31 December.

Responding to the report, a spokesperson for Hogan Lovells said: “As a leading global law firm we regularly review our global strategy and opportunities that we believe may be available to us, and that includes discussions with different firms in the market. This demonstrates our confidence in our unique offering and our balance of practice areas, global footprint and sector strength.”

Similarly, Shearman said: “We continuously consider the various levers of growth that are accessible to us as part of our strategic planning process. These include both internal and external opportunities that would benefit our firm and our clients. Beyond that, we never comment on market rumors or speculation.”

A Shearman-Hogan Lovells merger would create a new US super-firm with a combined annual revenue of around £2.97 billion. As for geographical coverage, Shearman would gain access to Hogan Lovells’ extensive European operations, whilst complimenting HL’s Dubai gaff with its Abu Dhabi outpost.

According to the Legal Cheek Firms Most List 2023, Hogan Lovells currently offers 50 TCs every year, whilst Shearman takes on 15 rookies with both firms paying their new recruits £50,000 in their first year and £55,000 in their second year. Hogan Lovells NQs then jump to £107.5k, but Shearman does not disclose its London NQ salaries.

If intake sizes remain at current levels, the new firm would number 65 trainees, on par with Herbert Smith Freehills and joint seventh on the Most List for most trainees. The firms’ combined London offices would also generate over £500 million, according to current earnings reports.

Whilst Shearman can trace its history back to birth of the law firm in America, Hogan Lovells was created from the 2010 merger between the London firm Lovells Washington DC’s Hogan & Hartson. Hogan Lovells clearly goes in for firms with a lot of history; at the time of the merger, Hogan & Hartson was the oldest major law firm headquartered in DC!

In the lead up to this merger, there was also much speculation over what the new name would be, with Love Harts and HogLove the most memorable suggestions.

Let us know what you think this potential new US super-firm should be called in the comments below…

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A bar disciplinary tribunal has found that a pupil barrister passed off work done by other members of chambers as his own.

No practising certificate may be issued to Mr X until 14 December 2025, the tribunal ruled in a decision that is open to appeal. He will also have to undertake a further six months pupillage.

On 12 May 2021, Mr X is said to have submitted a skeleton argument that was part of an advocacy exercise. This document, according to the tribunal, had already been submitted by another pupil back in 2018. Mr X accessed this document by searching the emails of the head of pupillage committee without their knowledge or consent.

Several days later, Mr X submitted a draft opinion that had been taken from another member of chambers and a pupil. Further, on 1 June, he submitted a draft letter in response to a letter of claim that had again been taken from a member of chambers and a pupil, having obtained their work without their knowledge or consent.

All three exercises were used for the purposes of assessing his capability within pupillage.

On 4 June 2021, Mr X told the head of the pupillage committee in a meeting that he hadn’t seen a draft letter written by a member of chambers before preparing his own.

The tribunal found that Mr X knew this statement to be false, and in all four circumstances had “failed to act with honesty and with integrity” and “knowingly misled or attempted to mislead” the other parties in each case.

In addition to the delay in the issuing of a practising certificate, Mr X was ordered to pay costs of £1,800.

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Keele University has launched what it says is the “UK’s first” undergraduate law degree that aims to equip aspiring lawyers with the necessary legal skills to tackle the climate emergency.

The new course, titled Law with Environmental Sustainability, hopes to enable students to explore the role of the law in humanity’s response to the climate crisis and develop a deep understanding of the need to enforce environmental regulations to help address climate change.

Professor Alison Brammer who heads up the university’s law school explained that “the climate crisis affects everyone, and we need legal professionals who understand sustainability and climate change to ensure that everyone — individuals, companies and public bodies — meet their obligations, and are empowered to use the law fully and innovatively to meet the challenge”.

In addition to learning about companies’ and governments’ environmental obligations and the legal mechanisms for enforcement and holding public bodies accountable, the course will also cover the major principles of English and EU law.

“This UK-first course reflects the ethos of the University in providing interdisciplinary study and showing a genuine commitment to environmental sustainability,” Brammer said. “It also speaks to the interests of the generations of students in the 2020s who seek degree education that equips them with the skills and knowledge to impact real world challenges, especially the active pursuit of environmental sustainability.”

This is not the first example of the climate crisis becoming the focus on legal institutions. Back in 2005, Lord Carnwath set up an EU group of “Judges for the Environment”.

The former Supreme Court Justice, who retired from the UK’s top court in 2020, has since made clear through various public lectures and comments that more should be done to combat the climate crisis, predicting the company directors who ignore the effects of their company’s activities on the environment might in the future risk breaching a duty of care. He has also suggested amending the Companies Act 2006 to entrench these environmental principles more clearly in directors’ duties.

Elsewhere, in September 150 legal experts put their names to a letter calling for top City law firms to be “ethically obliged” to advise clients of the dangers of pursuing deals that could be contributing to the climate crisis. The group, made up of KCs, solicitors, academics and legal experts, argued “lawyers must use their influence for good, supporting their clients in making the urgent transformation to business practices that is required to avert disaster”.

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A law student has gone public on Twitter with his chance encounter with a Supreme Court justice.

The student, who uses the handle @ManifestlyArb, has garnered almost 3,000 likes on his post which explained how he approached Lord Briggs to ask which bus stop he should get off in order to catch the tube.

As it turned out, the judge at the UK’s top court was going there too and asked the student to come along with him.

Unaware that he was in the presence of a justice of the Supreme Court, the pair struck up a “casual conversation” in which the student explained that he was reading law at university.

Lord Briggs then revealed to the student that he was a judge at the Supreme Court. In response to this Cinderella moment, the law student said he was “awestruck by Lord Briggs’ kindness”.

London: Asked a stranger on the bus which stop to get off at to catch the tube. He was going there too so asked me to come along. Casual conversation- I said I’m reading law, he said he’s a lawyer too. Working as a judge at the @UKSupremeCourt. Awestruck by Lord Briggs’ kindness.

— ऋbhav (@ManifestlyArb) December 14, 2022

This is not the first time law students have had a surprise encounter with a Supreme Court justice whilst commuting in London.

YouTuber Eve Cornwell chanced upon the then President of the Supreme Court Lady Hale on the Tube, whilst members of the Legal Cheek have also encountered Lord Sumption on the Tube and, most recently, at Heathrow Airport.

Baroness Hale also was spotted at Edinburgh Fringe in a selfie with criminal defence solicitor and Fringe performer Abigail Rolling.

After 12 consecutive sold out shows Baroness Hale wanted to pick my #shitlawyer brains on an obscure legal point (occupational hazard). My pleasure m’Lady#saveukjustice #legalaidcrisis #ukjustice #accesstojustice #uklaw #thelawisbroken #action4justice #EdFringe2022 pic.twitter.com/FxGCgphbbv

— Abigail Rolling (@AgentRipley) August 17, 2022

The former Supreme Court President, however, also appeared to have been mistaken by the Daily Mail in its coverage of King Charles’s visit to Gray’s Inn, badging the ex-legal supreme as “an affable member of staff”.

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Findings from Legal Cheek‘s Student Wellbeing Survey suggests applying for roles at law firms and barristers’ chambers is the most common cause of stress among law students.

Almost 250 students, most of whom had undertaken some form of legal education, participated in the survey, with 87% saying they had struggled with their mental health or wellbeing at some point during university or their legal studies.

The most common cause of stress was completing applications for vacation schemes and training contracts at law firms or pupillage at chambers. This narrowly beat stress caused by exams and assignments and the volume of uni work generally. Imposter syndrome, financial difficulties and not getting enough sleep were also common causes of stress.

Over 80% of respondents thought admitting they had mental health issues would impact a law firm or chambers’ perception of them.

Wannabe solicitors said they were “very wary” of firms inviting use of mitigating circumstances, with one noting that “admitting to a long-term mental health condition before interview stage makes me feel likely to be passed over by someone else who has the same credentials without the ‘risk’ of mental health issues becoming apparent”.

Another remarked that they were “terrified” to disclose information about their mental health for fear of coming across as “a whinging baby”.

Students also had a pretty dim view of the legal sector’s efforts on wellbeing, with fewer than 10% satisfied that law firms and chambers were doing enough on mental health. Almost half said the profession didn’t care enough.

The eye-catching research comes despite a raft of new initiatives that have come through in the wake of the pandemic, including the proliferation of flexible working policies and a trend of increasing financial support for future trainees in response to the cost of living crisis. Many participants characterised law firm’s efforts as “performative” and mere “lip-service”.

One respondent detailed: “I think the main issue is that law firms only care about supporting good mental health — they do not seem particularly compassionate towards those struggling with mental ill-health. Offering a subscription for a mindfulness app vs making reasonable accommodations for employees with an ongoing mental health disorder are two very different things. The sense one gets is that employers are only interested in delivering the former.”

Struggling with the stress of work? Contact LawCare via its helpline or live chat

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The Inns of Court College of Advocacy (ICCA) has teamed up the Chancery Bar Association (ChBA) to launch a new bursary scheme for ‘non-traditional’ students.

The scheme aims to encourage aspiring barristers who are considered underrepresented at the bar and at the Chancery bar in particular, to complete their vocational studies with the ICCA, an education and training organisation made up of judges, lawyers and lecturers from across all four Inns.

The ChBA is donating a lump sum of £100k in line with its object of promoting and enhancing the legal education and training of those practising or intending to practise at the chancery bar.

The bursary scheme will entitle successful candidates to up to one-third off the ICCA’s Bar Course and, in exceptional cases, cover the full amount. The scheme is available to those commencing their studies from September 2023 onwards and it is envisaged that the scheme will run until at least 2028.

According to the Legal Cheek Bar Course Most List, the vocational bar course can cost anywhere between £11,750 and £19,500.

Whilst law firms dominated the Social Mobility Foundation’s annual employer index 2022 that came out at the end of November, only one barristers’ set (Radcliffe Chambers) made the top 75.

However, some progress is being made to improve social mobility with a group of 20 leading commercial chambers joining forces earlier this summer to launch a new mentoring programme with the aim of encouraging students from under-represented groups to pursue careers as barristers.

The UK Supreme Court has also teamed up with Bridging the Bar, a charity committed to increasing the equality of access to opportunities in the legal profession, to launch its first-ever paid internship aimed at aspiring barristers from underrepresented communities.

The four Inns of Court all dish out large sums in scholarships every year too.

Andrew Twigger KC, chair of the ChBA, commented:

“The ChBA is committed to taking positive action to improve diversity at the Chancery Bar and to attract individuals from currently under-represented backgrounds to become, and to thrive as, members of the profession. It is hoped that this innovation will attract wider support and provide a means of entry into the profession for talented individuals who might otherwise be unable to afford it.”

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A former Magic Circle lawyer has raised further £3 million for his legal tech start-up that visualises complex legal transactions into flowcharts.

Tim Follett, who worked at Slaughter and May and Farrer & Co, launched StructureFlow in 2018 to address the frustration he experienced with inadequate tools for creating easily accessible visualisations of complex corporate deals.

The software aims to help law firms, in-house teams and their clients to keep track of what’s going on in a transaction by making it easy to create and share flowcharts that map these transactions and embed data and documents into its various components.

Having graduated Allen & Overy’s tech incubator Fuse at the end of 2021 and come first at Slaughter’s Collaborate Demo Day in 2019, Follett is reported to have forty paying law firm customers across the world, with Linklaters, Baker McKenzie, Norton Rose Fulbright among them as well as Slaughters and A&O.

Follett is now aiming to raise a further £7 million to £10 million next year on top of the £6.5 million he’s already banked, as it looks grow in the coming years. Moving forward he aims to “expand the data and collaboration functionality in our product and start working towards a Series A round next year”.

He told Legal Cheek:

“Getting the funding gives me increased confidence. We are creating a new category of legal tech — what we call ‘transaction modelling’. In 5 years time, we want people to look back in disbelief at the way PowerPoint was being used to visualise trillions of dollars of transactions.”

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Pinsent Masons and LexisNexis have launched a “unique” new training partnership that sees the businesses temporarily swap paralegals.

The tie-up will see LexisNexis paralegals gain qualifying work experience (QWE) at Pinsents as they work towards completing the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) on a part-time basis with legal education provider BARBRI.

The SQE is a new route to qualification that aims to improve accessibility to the legal profession. It includes a two-part exam (the SQE1 and the SQE2) and two years of QWE.

This differs from the previous system which only allowed those who had completed a two-year training contract to qualify, leaving wannabe solicitors, who had paralegalled for the two years or more but could not secure a TC, unable to gain their stripes.

The launch of the partnership will enable LexisNexis’ paralegals to receive practical, supervised legal training that counts towards their QWE requirements. At the same time, Pinsents paralegals will be seconded to LexisNexis in order to hone their research and knowledge skills.

Head of LexisPSL Hub, Josh Giddens, said: “The legal market is rapidly evolving and, as a leading LegalTech supplier, it is really exciting for LexisNexis to work with Pinsent Masons and BARBRI in offering new, innovative routes to qualification.”

Meanwhile, Richard Coffey, head of managed legal services delivery at Pinsent Masons, said the deal is “an exciting next step for us and our paralegals.”

The news comes in the same week the Law Training Centre launched a law course which enables students to gain QWE alongside their studies. BPP University Law School, The University of Law and Nottingham Law School offer similar opportunities through their pro bono centres.

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The Bar Standards Board (BSB) has revealed the law schools which offer aspiring barristers the best chance of passing their exams.

In order to become a practising barrister, the regulator requires candidates to complete three components: the academic study of the law (LLB or GDL), vocational study (the bar exam), and pupillage.

As of the end of December 2021, relative newcomer the Inns of Court College of Advocacy (ICCA) had the highest pass rate of 94%, with 35 of its 2021 cohort passing all all 10 modules.

The University of Law Birmingham and London branches both chalked up rates of 66% (58 and 131 passing students respectively), while it notched up an impressive 79% across its other sites (87 passing students).

City Law School narrowly missed out on silver, with a pass rate of 78% (277 students) for its 2021 cohort.

In total, 1,333 students passed the bar exam, equating to 65% of the total cohort of 2021.

BPP Manchester performed the best of the BPP sites with a 68% pass rate (94 students). BPP London scored 56% with 254 students passing.

The BSB report also separated out students by their degree classifications in their rankings, revealing a correlation between these classifications and the probability of passing the bar exams.

The average pass rates for those with first-class degrees across all law schools was 84% (367 passing students), compared to 65% for those with upper seconds (713) and 39% with lower seconds (253).

The BSB report does warn, however, that comparisons by degree class “represent a better comparative measure across providers, as provider’s student cohorts vary considerably by the proportion of students with different degree classifications”.

The BSB does not regulate the grading schemes awarded by each provider and further statistics on overall trends on a variety of issues including course fees, results, and progression to pupillage are due to be published in a separate report coming out next year.

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Law firms dominated the Social Mobility Foundation’s annual employer index 2022, occupying just over half of the 75 spots available.

Browne Jacobson maintained its position at the top of this year’s list, whilst Herbert Smith Freehills dropped from third to seventh, but remains a silver medallist amongst law firms.

The index is in its sixth year with the number of entrants dropping from last year’s record 203 to 149. Law firms made up 34% of this year’s entrants, the highest proportion of any profession by some margin with public sector employers being the second most common and accounting for 15%.

Thirty-eight law firms made the top 75 index which ranked employers based on eight areas including efforts to create a more inclusive workplace culture, ability to engage staff, suppliers and clients in social mobility efforts, and recruit graduates from universities outside the Russell Group.

Baker McKenzie came in eighth, followed by Squire Patton Boggs in ninth, whilst 12th to 14th spots were secured by DLA Piper (12th), Allen & Overy (=13th), Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner (=13th), and Linklaters (14th), respectively. Listed law firm DWF (17th), Lewis Silkin (18th), and CMS (=19th) also made the top 20.

Other law firms to make the list were Eversheds Sutherland (21st), Burges Salmon (23rd), Simmons & Simmons (25th), Osborne Clarke (26th), Clifford Chance (29th), Slaughter and May (31st), Hogan Lovells (32nd), Brodies (34th), Freshfields (35th), Shoosmiths (38th), Norton Rose Fulbright (39th), Mishcon de Reya (=40th), Womble Bond Dickinson (=41st), Burness Paull (47th), RPC (50th), Charles Russell Speechlys (=52nd), Macfarlanes (53rd), Mayer Brown (=57th), Clyde & Co (58th), Akin Gump (62nd), Sharpe Pritchard (=63rd), Irwin Mitchell (=63rd), TLT (64th), White & Case (68th), and Addleshaw Goddard (70th)

The Crown Prosecution Service took 36th position, whilst Radcliffe Chambers tied 57th with Mayer Brown, up from 62nd last year. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) did not feature in the index this year. Last year it ranked 11th.

The Rt Hon. Alan Milburn, the chair of the Social Mobility Foundation, cited two threats to social mobility at the moment: cost-of-living and austerity policies.

He commented:

“Britain remains a deeply elitist nation where someone’s chances of getting a well-paid job in a top profession are still strongly correlated with their social background. However, several employers in financial and professional services, law, medicine, government, and the public sector have come to the realisation that a different mindset and a different set of processes are needed to make their intakes more representative of the public they serve. These employers are making these changes both because they see the social need to do so and because they recognise the business benefit that greater diversity can bring.”

He also said there had been a “notable drop in the quality and quantity of submissions to the Index”.

Recent news in this area includes Clifford Chance’s decision to report its ‘social mobility pay gap’ data for the first time, the launch of a new social mobility work experience programme by Ropes & Gray, and a group of 20 leading commercial chambers joining forces to launch a new mentoring programme with the aim of encouraging students from under-represented groups to pursue careers as barristers.

There has also been a raft of law firms providing cost-of-living bonuses to staff, as well as increases in maintenance grants for future trainees.

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Lawyers, academics, and law students have been testing out ChatGPT, so we put ourselves up to the challenge to quiz the AI robot everyone is talking about with some questions of our own.

Open AI’s language-generating system has come a long way in the past two years. Back in August 2020, it was criticised for being unable to adequately place things in context which led to nonsensical responses, including one where it suggested that wearing a bathing suit was a suitable alternative to a suit for a lawyer attending court.

As a humble starter for ten, we wanted to see if the AI system was aware of a case that is quintessential to UK law students’ legal education: Donoghue v Stevenson.

We asked, ‘Explain who is it I can sue if I find a snail in my ginger beer bottle under English law’ and got a neat paragraph in response which you can see below. But, as is common practice when giving advice, cases were not explicitly referred to, so Donoghue v Stevenson sadly did not get a shout out.

Been asking the questions that matter to ChatGPT to test its legal acumen, law firm application skills, and it’s opinion of City law firms!

1) Donoghue v Stevenson pic.twitter.com/6gX0j15LFW

— Will Holmes (@wsgholmes99) December 5, 2022

Next, we asked it the classic application question ‘Why do you want to be a commercial lawyer?’.

2) Why do you want to be a commercial lawyer? pic.twitter.com/4Aw2woKDMT

— Will Holmes (@wsgholmes99) December 5, 2022

The AI bot also provided an excellent summary of the exceptions to the hearsay rule.

3) What are the exceptions to the hearsay rule? pic.twitter.com/U8eHr9IkQS

— Will Holmes (@wsgholmes99) December 5, 2022

We also asked ‘Which is the best law firm in the UK?’. This prompted a disappointingly vague response.

4) Which is the best law firm in the UK? pic.twitter.com/g4M3tZ6egc

— Will Holmes (@wsgholmes99) December 5, 2022

As well as answer questions, AI systems such as ChatGTP are also capable of producing documents, paraphrasing them and producing informative summaries — something that has not gone down all too well with lawyers.

Ok, so we need, the name of the person who invented this, a time machine, and Linda Hamilton's phone number.

— Coach House Chambers (@HouseChambers) December 5, 2022

I’m not a lawyer so me being able to copy a lease into ChatGPT and then asking it to explain it to me like I’m in 6th grade is a huge tool for normal people. pic.twitter.com/L6Vd6XTDIf

— Sean (@lostmyshoes01) December 4, 2022

It has also raised questions about how the tool might be used by students when writing essays and even teachers marking assignments!

The education of the future: teachers and students throwing AI at each other. https://t.co/TnQUk7KKKw

— Andres Guadamuz (@technollama) December 4, 2022

Have been playing around with ChatGPT and my impression is take-home/online exams are essentially dead in many subjects – incl most law undergrad subjects. It doesn’t produce great answers of course, but if you need a “pass”, it’ll suffice and much better w/ a little editing.

— 𝖤𝖽𝗆𝗎𝗇𝖽 𝖲𝖼𝗁𝗎𝗌𝗍𝖾𝗋 (@Edmund_Schuster) December 5, 2022

You can try the AI bot for yourself here.

The post We quizzed the AI robot everyone is talking about appeared first on Legal Cheek.

An employment tribunal has found in favour of trainee solicitor who brought a claim against the law firm where he was due to start his training contract.

The tribunal was told how Mr A Osvald, who completed the Legal Practice Course (LPC) back in 2013, put the prospect of a legal career on hold owing to the fact that he was his family’s primary child carer.

He was working for Royal Mail in “a well-paid flexible role” that catered for his personal situation, when he decided to apply for a training contract at Sussex outfit Holden & Co in 2021.

In November 2021, Osvald met with the firm’s managing partner to discuss the role. Osvald told the tribunal that his need for flexibility, office location, child pick-up arrangements and the possibility of the firm paying for a parking space close to the firm’s Hastings office were mentioned in this meeting.

The judge explained that this discussion “set out the parameters for a working relationship” which the partner then took forward in subsequent email offering Osvald part-time employment for the annual salary of £22,000 pro rata.

The email also required Osvald to complete four tasks including informing the Law Society about the six-year gap between finishing his legal studies and starting a training contract. He duly completed these tasks two days later and informed the firm that he was going to leave his job at Royal Mail.

Osvald only received the final contract four days in advance of his start date. Upon reading it, he raised several issues relating to terms about the location and working hours which he believed had changed from their initial agreement, stressing that he could only work in the firm’s Hastings office.

The partner responded that it was essential that Osvald could be required to work at the firm’s Ashford office and that he could not agree to all of his amendments.

In her ruling, employment judge McLaren rejected Holden & Co’s contention that the initial meeting was just “exploratory”, explaining that a contract had been offered and accepted based on Osvald and the partner’s meeting and subsequent email chain.

She noted: “As a very experienced solicitor, I would have expected [the partner] to raise some questions about this at the time if he did not consider that a contractual relationship had been formed.”

The contract’s subsequent amendment that required Osvald to go to Ashford therefore amounted to a breach of contract, the judge found.

The judge did not address the damages that would be due but said that “it would appear that the loss is attributable to the constructive wrongful dismissal itself” rather than the potential breach of any implied terms, subject to hearing further submissions from the parties.

The post Training contract holder wins dispute with firm over employment terms change appeared first on Legal Cheek.

It’s fair to say that Dentons is unique. The firm has over 200 offices spanning 70 different countries, which makes it unsurprising that it “attracts a certain type of client that wouldn’t even consider most other firms”.

Its unrivalled global coverage is perfect, as partner and global chair for Dentons’ employment and labor practice Purvis Ghani explained at last month’s Legal Cheek event, for “clients that want everything under one roof and one brand”.

There’s also the added benefit for its lawyers of being able to work on some of the largest and most complex deals and regulatory challenges out there. Ghani gave the example of advising international businesses during the pandemic in relation to vaccination requirements, whilst real estate partner Laura Gowing cited working with an international hotel business and a European hostel brand as amongst her experience.

Corporate partner Jayne Schnider added that Dentons has the advantage of saving clients the stress and hassle of finding a legal adviser in each and every jurisdiction. This, of course, comes with a caveat: “it only works with an interconnected team”. So, how does Dentons achieve this?

Ghani delighted in telling attendees at the event how “you get to know and work with colleagues and clients from all around the world. It’s the most exciting part of the job!” He stressed that the firm’s high-level structure ensured this functioned effectively with opportunities to get to know colleagues at every level — from the team in London to members of the firm in other parts of the world.

On this point, Gowing noted:

“This ranges from going for lunch with a colleague, participating in the firm’s sports teams and having a department away-day to getting involved in our global academies and diversity and inclusion groups which collaborate internationally throughout the firm as a whole”.

Such social projects are taken very seriously at Dentons. The firm is looking to continue to make progress on gender and ethnic minority representation and wants to ensure that its lawyers feel well-supported.

Schnider remarked, “we want all our people to feel able to go on to be a partner”, explaining how a new pilot programme offering female members of the firm networking and mentoring opportunities aims to increase the proportion of women joining the partnership. “It’s really important to showcase how you can have, for example, a family and a great career and making members of the firm that have done that really visible will only encourage others to be more confident in putting themselves forward for new opportunities”.

“Pro bono is strongly encouraged too,” noted Gowing. She highlighted how Dentons offers one of the most incentivising policies on pro bono, allowing its associates to count up to 70 hours of pro bono work towards their bonuses. Pro bono and volunteering opportunities include everything from advising on leases to working with victims of domestic violence to getting up early to cook breakfast for the homeless.

What’s more, the firm now has an “impressive” hybrid experience that offers clients and the firm’s lawyers the flexibility to interact virtually. That said, Schnider underlined the importance of being able to “re-build the great team spirit that comes from being in the office”.

And Dentons trainees tend to have an interest in tech and innovation too — they complete an innovation project in each seat they encounter, yielding, according to Gowing, some handy tricks and tools that improve efficiency.

One interesting takeaway from the event was what the panel and audience thought were the most important skills lawyers need to thrive at a firm like Dentons. The overwhelming majority of attendees opted in our poll that was conducted at the event for people skills — something with which the panellists agreed: “having empathy, understanding people and being human can really help you when it comes to solving clients’ problems”.

But the Dentons partners also stressed the importance of commercial knowledge, noting that whilst developing a high level of legal knowledge was expected during the training contract, “a lot of what we do is not just about law, so having a sense of what’s going on in the world and the economy is really useful”.

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“One day, this will all be yours” has come to be a perplexing promise for judges ruling on English law.

Such an utterance marked both the start of this recently decided dispute Guest v Guest and Lord Briggs’ majority judgment. The appellants were David and Josephine Guest who own Tump Farm which has been in the Guest family since 1938. The respondent was their son, Andrew.

The fact pattern of the case is as close as you can get to an oven-baked proprietary estoppel scenario cooked up by your law school examiners, as those familiar with the legal doctrine will quickly realise.

Andrew Guest left school at the age of 16 and spent the following 33 years working on his parents’ farm. He “worked long hours for low pay” in reliance on a promise from his parents that he would inherit a substantial share of the farm.

But, by 2015, there had been a breakdown in the relationship between Andrew and his parents. Their farming partnership was dissolved and Andrew was cut out of his parents’ will.

Andrew subsequently brought a claim against his parents to enforce the informal promise which is protected by a doctrine known as proprietary estoppel. The requirements for this doctrine are threefold: one must be able to prove that there was a representation or assurance, reliance, and detriment. It was held by the trial judge that Andrew had satisfied these criteria.

But what remedy should Andrew receive?

Should he get what he was promised (here, his share of the farm)? This is referred to as the expectation loss approach. Or should he get compensation for the detriment he has suffered (here, fair remuneration for his work done on the farm and his lost opportunity to work elsewhere)? This is referred to as the reliance loss approach.

The Supreme Court was split on this “lively controversy”, as Lewison LJ put it in Davies v Davies, with the 3-2 majority in favour of the expectation loss approach.

The majority offered the parents a choice: either put the farm into trust for the children (Andrew was one of three) subject to a life interest in the parents’ favour, or pay compensation to the tune of £1.3 million (50% of the value of the dairy farming business plus 40% of the value of the freehold land and buildings at the farm) as the trial judge had initially ordered but with a sufficient discount for Andrew’s early receipt to be agreed by the parties (or a Chancery court as a last resort).

Lord Briggs’ view centres around remedying the unconscionability of the promisor reneging on their promise. Citing a long list of cases in which he explained that expectation loss had been the approach taken by the courts, he set out the new approach in a two-stage test in paragraphs 74-80.

First, it must be proved that it is unconscionable, given the circumstances, for the promisor to go back on their promise. Second, there is the assumption (not presumption) that enforcing the promise should be the appropriate remedy unless the promisor can assert and prove that this would be out of all proportion to the detriment.

To illustrate this second point, he gives the example of a carer who is promised that they will inherit an elderly lady’s jewellery in return for their poorly remunerated services and it turns out that the jewellery is a Faberge worth millions.

Importantly, however, Lord Briggs stresses that this does not mean the court will seek to compensate the detriment in lieu of enforcing the promise. In short, forget using the reliance loss approach!

The reason this case, however, lends itself especially well to classroom discussions and essay questions is thanks to Lord Leggatt’s dissenting judgment.

Lord Leggatt’s view of proprietary estoppel (a term he says is “a misnomer and liable to mislead”) centres on remedying the detrimental reliance suffered rather than the unconscionability of going back on the promise.

In his view, the court should either enforce the promise (or an equivalent payment) or provide an award that is sufficient to compensate the reliance loss, selecting the minimum award necessary to avoid the promisee suffering a detriment in reliance on the promise. Accordingly, Lord Leggatt would have awarded Andrew £610,000 based on an estimation of what he would have earned if he had worked elsewhere.

These two contrasting judgments raise several interesting themes in relation to remedies for proprietary estoppel for law students to mull over in essays.

First, it appears that Lord Briggs’ approach goes some way to act as an exception to the usual requirements for contract formation. A legally binding contract requires clear and certain terms, intention to create legal relations, and consideration. In short, not any old promise can become a contract. But in proprietary estoppel cases, the promises need not be certain or clear, nor need there be intention to create legal relations.

Yet, following Lord Briggs’ judgment, the law now awards a remedy based first on expectation loss, as is the case in contract law. Accordingly, in his dissenting judgment, Lord Leggatt is keen to point out that “a property expectation claim [his preferred name for proprietary estoppel] is not a form of contract lite”.

Lord Briggs also notes the difficulty in determining a remedy in such cases where there is a great deal of emotional harm amongst other things, whilst Lord Leggatt reminds us that such remedies are common in tort law cases.

This brings us to the second important theme of this judgment: judicial discretion. This is an area where Lord Leggatt is clear that “English law needs to do better than this”. He is keen to avoid this area of the law becoming what one academic he cites as a “Jackson Pollock” of case authorities: “A splattering of unpredictable colour on a canvas, where a sense of objective form and predictability has been lost.”

As Lord Denning remarked in Crabb v Arun District Council, “equity is displayed at its most flexible” when applied in proprietary estoppel. But, it would be fair to point out such a degree of flexibility and judicial discretion is arguably necessary given the complexity of the various circumstances.

To give one example, in Stallion v Albert Stallion Holdings, Albert Stallion promised his wife Porntip that she would be able to live in his house for the rest of his life in return for granting him a divorce so that he could remarry. Following Albert’s death, Porntip sought to rely on the promise against the freehold owner. In an unusual remedy, the judge ruled that Porntip would not be granted exclusive possession, but was entitled to occupy the property rent-free for the rest of her life alongside the late Albert’s second wife Lilibeth who now occupied the premises along with a new husband and daughter!

Although the Supreme Court has now settled this “lively controversy” in Guest v Guest, such a bold dissenting judgment from Lord Leggatt will undoubtedly tempt some to rely on his arguments in the future, including some daring students looking to score top marks!

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The rise of artificial intelligence, important developments on FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms, and the eagerly anticipated inauguration of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) all make it an interesting time to be a patent lawyer.

Indeed, the evolving nature of the legal discipline which wraps its fundamental legal principles around the world’s latest innovations is one of the reasons why Mark Marfé is so enamoured with his work.

“It’s really exciting going back to the basic legal principles and figuring out how they apply to new technologies,” Pinsent Masons partner Marfé explains. “You get to collaborate with technicians and engineers to work out what’s going on under the bonnet and also meet with business executives so that you can pragmatically assess the liability and whether there is a real opportunity in a new piece of tech.”

This also happens internally at a team level with his colleagues at Pinsent Masons, Marfé tells us. Members of the IP team regularly have ‘brown-bag lunches’ where discussions and training sessions take place about the latest developments in the sector.

We’ve already touched upon what some of those topics might be. Marfé explains how AI tools are now being used for a wide range of things from generating images from written prompts to AI robot inventors.

The former has raised new questions in relation to the rights attaching to the various in-puts and out-puts on these AI systems (a topic that Legal Cheek covered recently). The latter has yielded a Supreme Court case on whether an AI can be labelled the inventor on a patent, a case which could involve granting legal personhood to an AI system for the first time. The hearing is set to take place in March next year.

If you’re more interested in macro legal trends than AI, there’s something for you too. The launch of the Unified Patent Court, which the UK opted out of joining back in 2020, is set to launch in spring 2023. This marks a whole new set of patent jurisprudence with Marfé noting that “it will be interesting to see how the new case law sits alongside national patent decisions”.

Another area of recent development has been FRAND terms, with the Supreme Court ruling in Unwired Planet v Huawei seeking to find a balance between licensors and implementers. Such cases tend to involve so-called ‘patent trolls’, who own portfolios of patents, and implementers struggling to negotiate what fair and reasonable licensing terms might be for standard essential patents. “It’s particularly interesting to see how this will play out in IoT [Internet of Things] and how the use of arbitration will develop in this area,” remarks Marfé.

In short, it’s an exciting time to be an IP lawyer and the next decade certainly has a lot in store. So what does it take to break into the industry?

With a background in life sciences, having done his undergraduate degree in cellular and molecular pathology, Marfé’s enthusiasm for the innovative is perhaps unsurprising. But he stresses that it is the enthusiasm that counts rather than his STEM background per se: “You need to have an enthusiasm to learn in this field which is constantly developing”.

He especially enjoys the strategic element of advising clients, be that helping them grow their businesses or overseeing and guiding them through a dispute. “The variety is great and you also get to work with interesting people on international projects”, says Marfé, who confesses being “hooked” on IP from the moment he worked on a matter involving Blackberry during his training contract.

As for skills a budding IP lawyer must possess, Marfé points to flexibility, an eye for detail, both commercial and legal knowledge, and good project management.

Of course it helps that the team at Pinsent Masons is “a very collaborative and interesting group of people, who enjoy collegiately sharing ideas and acting as a soundboard on the latest developments and enabling each other to be at their best”, says Marfé.

Mark Marfé will be speaking alongside other Pinsent Masons lawyers at ‘Going for growth: hot practice areas of the 2020s — with Pinsent Masons’, a virtual student event taking place tomorrow (Wednesday 30 November). You can apply for one of the final few (and free) places to attend the event.

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A top French court has found that a Parisian management consultancy firm was wrong to sack an employee for not being “fun” enough.

In 2015, the claimant, who is referred to anonymously as Mr T, lost his job at the Paris-based management consultancy firm Cubik Partners.

The grounds for his dismissal were “professional inadequacy” and specifically T’s failure to comply with the company’s “fun & pro” culture, which entailed mandatory social events including on weekends.

On appeal from the Paris Court of Appeal, the claimant, who was first taken on by the company in 2011, challenged his dismissal in the Court of Cassation. He claimed he had been wrongfully dismissed, arguing that he did not share the consultancy firm’s definition of “fun”, which was intended to foster a strong team spirit, and that he had the right not to comply.

His claim asked for the dismissal be declared null and void, that he be reinstated and that Cubiks Partners be ordered to pay him €461,406 (around £400,000) as compensation.

The “fun & pro” ethos was, in T’s view, a swathe of “humiliating and intrusive” practices which included the simulation of sexual acts, the obligation to share a bed with a colleague during seminars, the use of nicknames to designate people, and hanging up “deformed and made-up photos” in the office.

The judgment details that the mandatory work events included “excessive alcohol intake, encouraged by associates who made very large quantities of alcohol available” and instilled “practices linking promiscuity, bullying and incitement” at the firm as well as “various forms of excess and misconduct”.

In light of this, the top French court agreed that the claimant had been wrongfully dismissed and could rely on his right to freedom of expression to not participate and his right to dignity and respect for private life to not attend these mandatory events.

The Court ordered the firm to pay the claimant €3,000 (£2,577) in compensation, with a full examination of T’s request for €461,000 expected at a later date.

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A trainee solicitor earning over £50k-a-year has gone public with her eye-catching financial set-up.

The unnamed 20-something trainee lives alone in “a large, two-bedroom flat in a good location” in London which she rents from her parents for £850-a-month. The young rookie goes on to explain that she recently became single and has started an “intense” training contract at a London law firm.

The solicitor-to-be further reveals that her parents pay her phone bill and she still occasionally put things on her their credit card. Despite these financial comforts, when asked if she has any savings, the trainee tells the website Refinery 29: “£0 (lol)”. Fortunately, however, there’s the private pension set up for her by her parents, which has “about £70,000 in it”.

The City newbie reveals how her first job working for a retailer was “miserable” and that she had been forced to do it by her mum “as a way to learn the value of hard work etc”.

Characterising herself as “more of a spender”, she confesses that “one of the big regrets of my financial life” is using the £7,000 in bonds gifted to her by her parents on partying at university rather than on a car as they had intended. She also admits she was given about £20,000 by her grandma to invest in crypto – something she’d “rather not think about because it’s now worth less than half of that”.

Asked whether she is worried about money, she tells the website:

“I worry about money a lot despite being on a good salary and a good career path. Growing up reasonably wealthy, there are certain lifestyle non-negotiables I expect and I’m worried I won’t be able to provide them for my own family. I know I have terrible money skills and have absolutely zero self-control and it’s difficult trying to navigate being somewhat responsible alongside having the most amount of fun possible.”

“I am undoubtedly extremely privileged and I’m grateful every day for the life that I have,” she acknowledges. “I know my parents work extremely hard for us.”

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A newspaper covering King Charles’ visit to Gray’s Inn this week has inadvertently mistaken former Supreme Court President Baroness Hale for an “affable member of staff”.

Baroness Hale, who retired from the Supreme Court in 2020, is one of the UK’s most high-profile former judges and has become something of a cult figure amongst lawyers and law students.

The Beyoncé of the legal profession is known for her much studied judgments in Stack v Dowden and Miller II, where she wore a spider brooch when delivering the latter September 2019 ruling that Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament was unlawful.

The former legal Supreme is photographed alongside High Court Master Eastman sharing a laugh with King Charles on his visit to Gray’s Inn where Hale was first called to the bar back in 1969. The image was captioned by the Daily Mail “an affable member of staff shared an earthy laugh with the King during a reception at Gray’s Inn”.

The blunder was first spotted by Joel Semakula, a barrister at Landmark Chambers, who himself fell victim to the newspaper’s caption gaffs. The paper described as one of the “eager young fans” studying at the new City junior school.

I understand there are far worst things to be called in the Daily Mail than “eager young fan” studying at the Junior School

Not sure I would have gone with “affable member of staff” for the former president of the Supreme Court though

At least we can all have an “earthy laugh” pic.twitter.com/Ylwg3gCnkQ

— Joel Semakula (@JKSemakula) November 25, 2022

At least one commenter suggested the caption could refer to barrister and bench master Roger Eastman, who can been seen standing alongside Hale. Either way, “staff” seriously underplays both their positions within the profession.

The post Baroness Hale badged ‘affable member’ of Inn ‘staff’ by newspaper appeared first on Legal Cheek.

King Charles III was yesterday greeted by members of Gray’s Inn and a Corgi as part of an official Royal visit.

The King met with judges, barristers and students at the historic Inn, one of four which have the exclusive right to call budding barristers to the bar of England and Wales.

The monarch was gifted a Gray’s Inn tie to which he quipped it was “the Inn thing”, before noting that it was “terribly helpful to have an extra one to choose from”.

Charles, who has been a royal bencher since 1975, was given a tour by some of the masters of the bench, the Inn’s governing body, which included a stop by a painting of him completed by June Mendoza back in 1979.

Today we had the honour of welcoming His Majesty The King to the Inn. The King met with a small cohort of students, practising barristers, Benchers and staff who represented the people that make Gray’s Inn special.

Read more on our website: https://t.co/lHWywRUYQg pic.twitter.com/hDF4BKhK8r

— Gray's Inn (@HonSocGraysInn) November 23, 2022

He then went on to chat to members of the Inn and was reported to be especially enamoured with a corgi that one of the attendees had brought with them.

Spotted alongside Charles was Dr John Sorabji, a barrister who also teaches at University College London (UCL), who was appointed as the King’s deputy private secretary last month.

The visit coincided with South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state visit which led commentators to speculate His Majesty was “demonstrating his personal commitment to the rule of law” by choosing to spend his time in the historic centre of legal London.

Gray's Inn and its members were honoured with a visit from its Royal Bencher, His Majesty King Charles III, this morning. Not just another of work @3VBchambers pic.twitter.com/PySa6S4ZZI

— Can Yeğinsu (@Can_Yeginsu) November 23, 2022

Gray’s Inn treasurer Sir Peter Gross commented that the visit was “of the greatest significance for Gray’s diverse community, together with its key values and activities in education and the Rule of Law, domestically and internationally, including the Commonwealth.”

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Tributes have been paid to Irish lawyer turned TikTok star Richard Grogan following news of his passing yesterday.

The employment law specialist enjoyed a distinguished legal career as well as huge popularity on the social media platform TikTok.

He studied law at University College Dublin, qualifying as a solicitor in 1979, and went on to launch his own firm Richard Grogan & Associates in 2009.

Grogan’s TikTok account garnered nearly 300,000 followers and 2.2 million likes which led to him being shortlisted in the ‘best use of social media’ category at last year’s Legal Cheek Awards. He was known for his straight-talking employment pointers and catchphrase “that’s the law and that’s a fact”.

@richardgrogansolicitors #thatsthelawandthatsafact ♬ original sound – richardgrogansolicitors

Fellow solicitor Stuart Gilhooly explained in a Twitter post that Grogan “had been unwell for some months but wore his illness with bravery and stoicism”.

He continued in his tribute to the late lawyer: “His work in making employment law accessible to the consumer and in the most simple terms will never be forgotten”, a statement that rings true to the kind words shared by his TikTok fans on his final video.

Another wrote: “RIP Richard. You helped countless people with your videos and your advice. You’ll be sorely missed on this platform, and that’s a fact”, whilst another said “The work you did to make sure those were treated fairly within the workplace is one many will be forever thankful for.”

The Law Society of Ireland paid tribute to Grogan, saying: “Richard was a tireless advocate, both in proceedings and in the public arena. We will miss his energy, humour, and deep commitment to the profession. Our thoughts are with his family at this difficult time.”

The Law Society is deeply saddened to learn of Council member Richard Grogan's passing.

Richard was a tireless advocate, both in proceedings and in the public arena. We will miss his energy, humour, and deep commitment to the profession. pic.twitter.com/VW3Ew02iYZ

— Law Society Ireland (@LawSocIreland) November 23, 2022

Lawyers Against Homelessness also praised the advocate’s work for the charity: “Remembering our esteemed and most generous colleague Richard Grogan who gave selflessly of his time, talent and genius to the homeless. Rest in peace Richard.”

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