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This podcast is based on an exclusive interview with John Miller, Group General Counsel and Company Secretary at Toni & Guy, who talks about Technology, London Fashion Week and Globalisation.Rating: MediumTags: fashion, stylecounsel, Toni & Guy, retail, interview

This is a guest blog for GCRC by Larry Bridgesmith, Chief Relationship Officer at legal project management specialist company ERM Legal Solutions and Adjunct Professor at Vanderbilt University School of Law.Rating: MediumTags: in-house, operations, clients, management

So another week in football goes by with sackings, title swings and Champions League semi-final thrashings by the new pretenders against the former favourites. The major news story in England, despite the actual football-related dramas in the Premier League and Champions League, has, of course, been David Moyes’ sacking. Rating: MediumTags: football, sport, in-house, sacking, operations

UEFA have made their first FFP-sized bite into financial irresponsibility in European football. Following years of sugar daddy investments and gargantuan losses among the elite (and less elite) clubs in Europe, UEFA is finally executing its first punishments relating to its Financial Fair Play rules, designed to combat against financial irresponsibility.Rating: MediumTags: sport, litigation, football, uefa, finance

Speakers from Patents and Intellectual Property Law explain their work and the training process involved for each career. The second speaker is an Intellectual Property solicitor from Hogan Lovells.Rating: MediumTags: guest, oxford, ip, intellectual property, oprations, patents, careers

Alex Ang speaks to us about his upcoming PKM course. Personal Knowledge Management is a set of practices and tools designed to improve your ability to organise and retrieve knowledge and reduce cognitive stress. PKM is designed to assist professionals in information-heavy environments such as law firms and in-house legal departments.Rating: MediumTags: interview, pkm, knowledge management, information, operations, knowledge

Speakers from Patents and Intellectual Property Law explain their work and the training process involved for each career. The first speaker for Our 2010 talk is a patent attorney from J.A. Kemp.Rating: MediumTags: guest, oxford, ip, intellectual property, oprations, patents, careers

An article in Forbes has highlighted how legal action has become a tool for big businesses to continue their suppression of upcoming start-ups, rather than allowing a level playing field.Rating: MediumTags: operations, litigation, start-ups, corporate

Mari Teigen, Research Director, Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway, gives a talk for the Gender Quotas for Corporate Boards and Democratic Legitimacy debate.Rating: MediumTags: guest, oxford, law, gender, quotas, corporate, politics

StyleCounsel is the GCRC’s latest sector that will be focusing on luxury goods, retail and fashion law. This is our first exclusive interview with Alice Darwall, Group General Counsel at French Connection Group, who talks about ecommerce, globalisation and counterfeiting. (Voices recorded by external voice-over artists)Rating: MediumTags: operations, fashion, stylecounsel, counterfeiting, globalisation, ecommerce

Another year, another budget, and another debate about class. It was ever thus. But aside from ‘them working class lot’ with their bingo and beer, it appears that local authority legal teams are becoming more and more drawn towards privatization, such are the cuts being made to the public sector.Rating: MediumTags: local, budget, abs, councils, operations

This is a guest podcast from the Oxford University Building a Business Seminar Series. Ian Bingham, Senior Partner, IP Asset LLP, gives a talk for the Building a Business seminar series looking at intellectual property law and how new businesses can protect their ideasRating: MediumTags: guest, oxford, ip, intellectual property, seminar, business, operations

Sports and data was the theme of our last sports panel and it is also a topic that is gaining more and more coverage in both the business and the sporting world. Whether its the commercial data relating to sports, data relating to sports and gambling, or just data that can be used by sports teams and players to improve performance, it is clear that, as in other industries, data is infiltrating almost every aspect of the sporting world.Rating: MediumTags: sport operations, data, strategy

A report by an Ottawa industry analyst has confirmed a sentiment that has been bubbling across the global legal landscape - that of the emergence of the entrepreneur freelance lawyer. With outsourcing, automation and consultants already prominent in legal practice, a swarm of ‘freelance’ lawyers could potentially change the way in-house lawyers look for external counsel. Rather than going to your previous law firm, or traditional panel processes, GCs may instead be looking in new forms of freelance directories, virtual law firms or perhaps aspiring to the use of a new wave of celebratory entrepreneur lawyers.Rating: MediumTags: recruitment, hr, legal, management, operations, law

Behind each in-house lawyer appointment is someone doing the appointing, and while the company employer - whether that be a CEO, GC or anyone else in the company - has the greatest say over who will get the job, legal recruitment experts and companies have always been influential and useful. Increasingly, legal recruitment firms are looking at in-house as a particular niche they can exploit, as companies without the legal know-how of private practice seek guidance into the legal world. Mike Evers, who we interviewed earlier this year, is one such person, while Dimitri Mastrocola, a partner and leader of a Major, Lindsey & Africa, was interviewed last week by the Financial Times about legal recruitment.Rating: MediumTags: recruitment, hr, legal, management, operations, law

‘Proactive Prevention’. It seems an odd concept the idea that prevention - the negation of something - is supposed to be something proactive. Yet this is the life and work of any decent in-house lawyer because, contrary to many lawyers working in private practice, the job is to prevent litigation and legal difficulties in need of rectification, rather than to live of it. The negation of the life supply of private practice work from your client is the purpose of an in-house lawyer’s responsibility because he or she is hired to reduce legal costs but at the same time protect the company.Rating: MediumTags: management, legal, operations, law, risk, prevention

In the fifth of the series of articles based on the discussions held at the first GCRC Sports Panel last month, we will be looking into how in-house lawyers manage the use of social media in their organisations. The discussion mostly focussed on whether an organisation’s guidelines or rules focussing on social media should be prescriptive or more like advice. Karena Vleck, Head of Legal and Governance at the RFU, and GCRC Sports Panel Chairperson, noted that the RFU’s social media policy is intended to be more advisory.Rating: MediumTags: social media, legal, in-house, law, lawyers, sport, panel, discussion

In the third of the series of articles based on the discussions held at the first GCRC Sports Panel last month, we will be looking into how in-house lawyers manage a legal disaster. The discussion began with question of what a legal disaster actually is, as differentiated from the prior topic of managing a PR disaster.Rating: MediumTags: gcrc, sport, panel, discussion, operations, management, legal, law

In the second of the series of articles based on the discussions held at the first GCRC Sports Panel last month, we will be looking into how in-house lawyers interact with other departments to manage a PR disaster.Rating: MediumTags: gcrc, legal, law, operations, in-house, sport, panel, pr, disaster, management

In-house lawyers help a company deal with risk, or more pertinently, the consequences of risks badly taken. But proactive/appreciated in-house lawyers do not just deal the legal wreckage of strategic mistakes made by the board, but they also involve themselves in the strategic thinking of the company in respect to risk management.Rating: MediumTags: gcrc, legal, law, operations, in-house, risk, corporate, management