A regular briefing for the alternative asset management industry. 

Welcome to the fifth episode in our Spotlight on ESG video series. 

A majority of the Supreme Court recently held that an insolvent company does not suffer any recoverable loss if payments are made from its bank accounts that discharge a debt owed by that company. This decision adds to the growing case law on the Quincecare duty.

Welcome to the first episode of our Mitigating a Data Breach: Insider Threats podcast series. In this series of 3 podcasts, members of the Travers Smith Cybersecurity team, Technology & Commercial Transactions Partner James Longster, Employment Partner Adam Wyman and Dispute Resolution Senior Counsel Rachel Wilson, take a look at what happens in the aftermath of a data breach.

Welcome to our Mitigating a Data Breach: Insider Threats podcast series. In this series of 3 podcasts, members of the Travers Smith Cybersecurity team, Technology & Commercial Transactions Partner, James Longster, Employment Partner Adam Wyman and Dispute Resolution Senior Counsel Rachel Wilson, take a look at what happens in the aftermath of a data breach.

In the first of 3 briefings looking into the range of tenures available for use in developing new retirement accommodation schemes, this piece discusses the report published this month by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Housing and Care for Older People called: ‘Making retirement living affordable: the role of shared ownership housing'.  The report results from an enquiry set up by the group in December 2021, supported by a panel of 6 independent members from both the profit and not-for-profit housing sectors, to investigate whether the shared ownership model could help make high-quality retirement housing in England accessible to a much larger market than the other main options of purchasing properties outright or renting from a social housing provider.

Improving cybersecurity for essential services and infrastructure is high on the agenda for the UK's and the EU's legislators, in response to the ever-evolving threat landscape. The UK's and the EU's respective network and information systems or NIS regimes, while both to be strengthened (including by bringing managed service providers into scope), look to be diverging. 

Key employment and business immigration developments for employers.

A regular briefing for the alternative asset management industry. 

The Court of Justice of the European Union ("CJEU") has ruled that Amazon could be held liable for trade mark infringement in relation to advertisements for 'fake' Christian Louboutin shoes placed on its website by a third party.  

Landlords, operators and managers of buildings in England that contain 2 or more residential units which share communal spaces will be impacted by the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 (the "Regulations") that come into effect on 23 January 2023. They are laid under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 ("Fire Safety Order"), and implement the majority of the recommendations set out in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 1 report.

In our Dispute Resolution 2022 Yearbook, we discussed the recent trend whereby minority shareholders rely on claims for breaches of a duty of good faith as the basis for an unfair prejudice petition. In this case, in the context of such a petition, the Court of Appeal construed an express duty of good faith in a shareholders' agreement, and provided some guidance as to the approach to interpreting such clauses.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

As legislators and regulators increase their focus on human rights and good governance, the UN Principles for Responsible Investment ("UNPRI"), an international organisation that works to promote the incorporation of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into investment decision-making, announced at the end of last year the creation of a new collaborative stewardship initiative, Advance.

A failure of trust?

Trust has been a key theme that has emerged in crypto in 2022. Going back to the original Bitcoin "White Paper"¹, the very stated purpose of crypto and blockchain technology was to transcend a "trust based model" of the traditional financial system to enable payments – and later, with the development of smart contract platforms such as Ethereum, more complex transactions – to be entered into and executed without reliance on trust in counterparties and intermediaries, those being replaced by code and distributed consensus.

Last week one of the most significant conferences related to biodiversity concluded in Canada. COP15 has come shortly after the close of COP27 and attendees sought to agree a new set of goals to hopefully halt and reverse the worrying loss of natural capital that our planet is currently facing.

In this briefing we look at some of the key changes to law and practice that we anticipate taking place in 2023 which will affect the real estate sector, focussing on real estate development, real estate investment, real estate M&A, real estate occupiers, the senior living sector and the private rental sector.