I can still recall the excitement of my first Amazon order in 1996 – a book delivered from amazon.com in the US took just a few days to arrive on my desk in Hong Kong. A generation later, Amazon has put a tentative toe in the online legal services market. My sense of excitement is […]
Corruption in Panama is nothing new. The country’s notorious former leader, Manuel Noriega, was convicted by a US court in 1992 of racketeering, drug smuggling, and money laundering. After serving a long US prison sentence, in 2010, he was sentenced in France to a further seven years in prison for money laundering. According to Transparency […]
Two recent media stories have featured prominently in relation to where Britain’s drug laws are heading. In isolation, the arguments supporting each of them make sense, but put together they demonstrate how contradictory our legal system and public health policy might become, should they both be realised simultaneously. The first story concerned a government green […]
An early mantra for Trump’s 2020 presidential election campaign has already made its mark at Republican rallies. The antithesis of woke, Donald supporters now break into a chilling new chant: “Send her back!” The object of their vilification is Somali-born Ilhan Omar, who serves as a congressional democrat in Minnesota. It echoes the 2016 campaign […]
As law firm revenues and profits continue to reach new heights so do the buildings which house their industrious lawyers, most especially in London. The scope and scale of this vaulting ambition can be measured by the architectural majesty of their newly opened offices, or those which they soon plan to occupy. In a competitive […]
For almost every business of any size operating in Europe, The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has become an integral feature of corporate life. Designed to protect EU citizens, its primary impact has been felt on businesses large and small as EU regulators have sought to make it the global standard for privacy and data […]
Imagine if you ran a small engineering company and decided to open an account with a bank which you used for several years in ordinary commercial business, only to find that its operations were then terminated. Not only that, but your account was frozen as the bank in question was accused by the US government […]
The recent outbreak of serious disorder in Hong Kong has given way to an uneasy calm. Following an ostensibly bizarre decision by local police to withdraw and allow hundreds of protestors to occupy and then vandalise the Legislative Council (LegCo), the building has been sealed off as forensics teams gather evidence, including fingerprints on discarded […]
Albania and its troubled Prime Minister, Edi Rama, are used to being the subject of protests. Speaking recently at a conference in London alongside Zoran Zaev, Prime Minister of North Macedonia and Ana Brnabic, Prime Minister of Serbia, Rama joked: “When you watch Albania today and see the pictures, you think: Oh my God, it’s […]
Barristers choose their words carefully when representing their clients in court. And so it proved when Steven Kay QC put his clients’ case in the Commercial Court in April. In his opening statements on behalf of former Metropolitan Police officers, Nigel Brown and Alec Leighton, Kay said: “It doesn’t matter what their motivation was with […]
‘The rule of law, if preserved, will ensure that Hong Kong continues to attract international business and investment and to hold its own entrepreneurial citizens here. This is a community largely made up of refugees from China – you don’t have to explain to those citizens the difference between having and not having the rule […]
Ask a group of international lawyers which country provides the best justice and most of them will respond with an answer which includes the phrase: well, that depends. Identifying a bad system of justice is easy. It’s rather like being a passenger in a defective car: you can see there are no seatbelts, the windscreen […]
