Reimagining the Law 24 June 2020

1. Financial Services

Simplify financial services regulation for retail investors by replacing the already much attenuated principle of caveat emptor with caveat vendor, perhaps by imposing a fiduciary standard upon all links of the investment chain, thereby mitigating the consequences of asymmetry of information at the heart of most financial services problems.
Howard Jacobs

2.Law firms working collaboratively

Rivals, VW and Ford, will share technology and platforms for the next generation of pickup trucks. The appearance of each product will be distinct. There is no swapping of shares. This will maximise profitability in a competitive marketplace where customers' expectations are increasingly high. Why can't law firms do the same?
Philip Rodney

3. A guillotine on emergency powers

All legislation and soft law made in response to the Covid-19 pandemic should 'expire' within 12 months of being made, with legislators and governments required to re-enact measures (in slower time and subject to normal processes of parliamentary scrutiny and accountability) where those measures are thought to remain necessary.
Christine O'Neill

4. Legal education

Legal education should be less legal and more social scientific

Lawyers live in social worlds. Commercial awareness, legal design, organisational governance, litigation tactics, technology application all demand a much stronger grounding in understanding risk, social systems, and behaviour. Also, I am sorry to break to you all, more maths.
Professor Richard Moorhead

Tomorrow's Law School

To prepare tomorrow's lawyers - the development by the UK of a global online learning resource that provides training by leading experts in the disciplines that will be central to the delivery of legal services in the future, including knowledge engineering, risk management, design thinking, and technology.
Professor Richard Susskind OBE

5. Structured community engagement on major projects

Securing host community support for infrastructure and resource extraction projects is critical. However, no established structure exists to act as an intermediary with communities as a whole to ensure their concerns are addressed and considered. An independent intermediary body would help a secure societal licence to operate for these projects.
Keith Ruddock