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How do you know that your business owns or has the relevant rights to the intellectual property in its software, particularly where the rights are not registrable?  What can your business do to manage the risk of its developed software infringing third party intellectual property rights? This briefing looks at key strategies to help manage intellectual property risks in software development.

A regular briefing for the alternative asset management industry. 

Employers can expect significant reforms to UK employment law under plans announced by the new Labour government.

If open source software did not exist, firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software, according to a 2024 Harvard Business School paper . In fact, Synopsys' 2024 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report states that 96% of codebases contain open source software. So, what is open source software?

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Key employment and business immigration developments for employers.

Smart contracts have been somewhat eclipsed by the recent focus on artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI. But as we explain below, smart contracts have their uses – and it's possible that in future, generative AI could complement smart contracts to further automate the contracting process.

As technology evolves, and with burgeoning markets in artificial intelligence, software companies are not only in the position of needing to comply with GDPR themselves but are also pivotal in the design and operation of products or services that allow their customers to achieve GDPR compliance – understanding and smoothing the compliance path for customers can set a software company apart from the competition, fortifying its position within the marketplace.  This article suggests key GDPR compliance strategies.

Many businesses in the scope of the UK's Energy Saving Opportunities Scheme ("ESOS") will, having submitted their ESOS notification to the Environment Agency, now have put this reporting obligation to the back of their mind until phase 4 in around three years' time. However phase 3 of ESOS brought some important changes, one of which will keep ESOS on the agenda on an at-least-annual basis for the foreseeable future.

A regular briefing for the alternative asset management industry. 

The Court of Appeal has given its ruling in the Virgin Media case (see our alert).  This concerned the validity of a rule amendment affecting benefits in a defined benefit contracted-out scheme which was made without obtaining the actuary's written confirmation that contracting-out requirements would still be met, as required by section 37 of the Pension Schemes Act 1993.  Such confirmations were required for amendments made between 6 April 1997 and 5 April 2016.  The Court of Appeal confirmed that confirmation was required for changes to future service benefits (as well as changes to past service benefits).

The Institutional Limited Partners Association ("ILPA") has relaunched its cross-industry Quarterly Reporting Standards Initiative ("QRSI") which aims to deliver the next evolution of ILPA quarterly reporting. The QRSI temporarily paused the comment period on its draft updated ILPA Reporting Template and a new draft Performance Template, which were released for comment in June this year, following the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruling to vacate the US SEC Private Fund Adviser rules ("PFAR") as the ruling shifted the rationale for the changes to the quarterly reporting standards from compliance with the SEC requirements and opened the door for an "adoption focused approach" built on industry practices with more flexibility and scope to take into account IFRS and other international standards.

The UK Subsidy Control Act 2022 (the "Act") came into force on 4 January 2023 in order to replace the European Union ("EU") state aid regime and satisfy the UK's obligations under the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. The Act sets out a framework for public bodies to comply with when awarding subsidies to businesses and provides a means for private challenge of the granting of any such awards.

The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D) will be highly consequential for those large EU and non-EU companies that fall within its scope. Despite some misleading commentary to the contrary, the financial sector is in scope of the CS3D as finally agreed by the European legislators in May 2024.

In this session from the recent PMI's Annual Conference (July 2024), Partner and Head of Pensions Susie Daykin, Technology & Commercial Transactions Partner James Longster and The Pensions Ombudsman's Senior Counsel David Craddock with some insightful questions from the chair, Client Director of Vidett Limited, Mike Birch, explored the regulatory challenges and opportunities surrounding the integration of AI in the pension sector. They discussed some of the potential "use cases" in the pensions space and explored the regulatory, governance and other issues that trustees should be thinking about when AI is used.

Earlier this month, the EU's European Artificial Intelligence Act ("AI Act")^[1], the world's first comprehensive regulation on artificial intelligence, came into force. The AI Act aims to ensure that AI systems are safe, transparent, traceable and environmentally friendly.

The EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive ("CSRD") was due to be implemented into national law by the Member States by 6 July 2024. The majority missed that deadline to finalise their laws.

Last week, the UK Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) published new draft merger control guidance for consultation, updated to reflect how the CMA's new powers under the UK Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act 2024 (DMCCA). The guidance confirms how the CMA can use the new incoming jurisdictional tests to cast a wide net and catch a broad range of deals. But the guidance also provides for greater procedural flexibility during the CMA's reviews – including specifically for private equity firms. See below for some initial takeaways, prior to the guidance being finalised.