It’s that time of year again. Thinking about what’s gone before us and planning for the future – looking at what we do, how we do it, and more importantly, who we do it for. The last 10 years or so have seen the legal sector go through a period of unprecedented change, a period of change that shows no sign of abating any time soon. While ‘Tesco Law’ hasn’t brought Armageddon to the high street, (as I was told it would during the very first law firm conference I attended back in 2010), without doubt, for the vast majority of those in practice, the legal sector is a very different place to what it was in 2007, pre-economic downturn.

I suspect that many in the industry were as surprised as I was to read the decision in Agoreyo v London Borough of Lambeth [2017] EWHC 2019 (QB), which determined that suspension was in fact not a ‘neutral act’ and instead can amount to a repudiatory breach of the implied term of trust and confidence. It has made me reconsider what practical advice we must now give to clients considering suspension, to avoid it being considered a ‘knee-jerk’ reaction, and potentially amounting to a fundamental breach of contract.

I recently came to the end of a multi-day employment law case. My opponent was everything one might have traditionally expected a barrister to be: white, male, apparently public school educated and wearing a pinky ring to assure us he was of the right pedigree. From the moment I introduced myself with a smile on the first morning of the case (as I always do), he immediately assumed an over-familiarity with me, accompanied by a mean-spirited jocularity which I doubted he would have assumed had I been a fellow male barrister. On the second day of the case, after I had finished cross-examining his client, he approached me as the parties were leaving the tribunal room. He began an apparently casual conversation with the innocuous comment “It got awfully warm in there this afternoon”, to which I started to respond with an equally innocuous observation about the air-conditioning being switched off. Before I could finish my sentence, he retorted with “It must have been all your hot air”.

“Just so I’m crystal clear on this,” said Santa, with just a hint of frustration in his voice, “you’re telling me that, from May next year, I can’t use my database of good and naughty boys and girls unless I spend Mrs Claus’s Christmas money on GDPR consultants?” The board meeting of Claus Logistics at the North Pole was not going well and Muggins, the legal & compliance elf, was shifting uneasily in his little pine seat. “With respect, Mr Claus, I’m not sure you’re allowed to refer to them as boys and girls any longer because I heard a bloke on Polar FM and he was saying…” “Enough!” said Santa with a look that could melt the frost on a reindeer’s muzzle. “At the risk of misquoting Monty Python, I don’t care a tinker’s cuss for all this red tape.”

The internet has been awash recently with initial coin offers (ICOs). Although crypto-currency has been around for a few years, only recently have hip-hop stars got in on the action. ICOs are an initial public offering (IPO) of crypto-currency, but to understand that (or even to understand why you should care about ICOs), you have to understand what crypto-currency is, and the blockchain technology on which it relies.