Conference programme

International franchise agreements tend to be long standard forms used across the world by the franchisor. In many regions, such as Latin America, (master) franchisees are large group corporations (conglomerates) with sizeable to large bargaining power. How to navigate negotiations without allowing to many deviations from the franchise system and uniform contracting practices?

The development of any new power facility typically requires thorough environmental assessments and community consultations to identify and mitigate potential environmental and social impacts, which result in a constraining consultation and permitting process. It also requires providing long-term benefits to the local community through job creation, skill development and community investment to ensure the project’s acceptance and integration. This session will explore, based on the experience of various jurisdictions, how local integration can be best achieved.

Costs (especially salaries) for law firms are going up, revenues are flat or dropping. This means margins are reduced and for the first time ever for many partners, profits are reduced. How do law firms best survive and indeed flourish in this changing world? We are moving from lawyers ‘have never had it so good’ (during the Covid-19 pandemic) to law firms risking failure and/or partner departures due to not managing profit.

This session will give you some ideas as to how to avoid margin squeeze, how to keep your firm profitable and how to avoid losing the most productive partners.
 

This panel will create a crisis scenario in which different corporate executives, including general counsels and compliance officers, will discuss the different aspects and best management options in a corporate crisis.

Consideration of permanent establishment (PE) issues, exit taxes, flips and other transformative events.  

Does artificial intelligence (AI) (also generative) already have a role in advocacy? Could AI help prepare a case, eg drafting a line of questions for a cross-examination? Can AI help be effective and sharp in arguments? Is AI-generated advocacy persuasive? Does AI improve efficiency? Are there ethical issues to be considered? Is AI only a tool for rich companies, to the detriment of less developed entities/counsel?

Increasingly more protectionist policies are adopted across the globe which affects business ability to make deals (new FDI and FSR regimes, etc.) and to access markets (IMEC v. BRI, security restrictions for hardwares sales, etc.). This session will look at how this trend towards deglobalisation is affecting the communications sector.

This session will cover:

•    Assessing the value of closely held businesses;
•    identifying and addressing operational, governance and regulatory issues;
•    finding the most appropriate deal structure;
•    the role of technology in preparing for a sale;
•    transitioning ownership and leadership;
•    getting prepared for buyer scrutiny; and
•    anticipating post-sale integration issues.

Enforcement against anti-competitive hiring practices is now firmly established as a global trend. Labour issues have now arisen in the spheres of anti-cartel enforcement, merger control and abuse of dominance. Our panel will provide an update on global developments and consider the practicalities. Should agencies characterise ‘no poach’ agreements as per se violations? What are the main drivers of non-compliance in this area and how can in-house counsel work with human resources (HR) teams to ensure their conduct does not cross the line?

Regulating supply chains by imposing responsibility on businesses with regard to environmental, social and human rights issues has become a global trend. In a first wave, legislators have tried to use supply-chain related laws to prevent illegal deforestation of rain forests or the sourcing of conflict minerals from regions where profits fund armed conflict. Recently, this concept has been broadened to cover all major supply chains. Even though just a few countries (eg, Germany) have implemented such laws, the concept has become truly infectious, spreading along supply chains all around the globe. In the next step, climate legislation will apply this instrument: the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). CBAM will impose price adjustments on imports of designated goods into the EU, based on the CO2 emissions in production outside the EU. The session will focus on the concepts underlying these developments. What are the standards of diligence? How do businesses and governments cope with information gaps? What is the role of certificates?

Which project/budget security instruments are available (ie, bonds, retention, security, insurance) and what remedies against bankruptcy are available to secure a proper financial execution of an infrastructure or construction contract?

Over the course of the two decades of this century, we have seen the rise of the corporate player in immigration detention centres across various jurisdictions. This session will explore the challenges and governance of immigration detention centres, concepts of arbitrary detention and its violations arising worldwide, rights of detainees and potential solutions.

The ability to teleport anywhere on the planet at any time, instantly experiencing everything first-hand and in real-time, will completely change our relationship with travel. Imagine never again having to wait for a connecting flight or worry about missing the tour bus because you have another appointment across town.   

The session will address the various legal issues in relation to the metaverse technologies involving the fields of antitrust, data and consumer privacy, intellectual property, real estate and financial regulatory compliance.
 

In this interactive session jointly moderated by the Real Estate Section and the Insolvency Section a panel of experts from around the globe will discuss a case study of a major development project in financial distress and the best legal practices available in their jurisdictions to mitigate damages and losses in such case. 
 
The panel will consider the case study from the viewpoints of various stakeholders to the distressed project including developer, consumers, lender, contractor, landlord and insolvency professional, and will give their expert views on how best to advise those stakeholders and at what stage of the project in order to avoid so far as possible adverse financial and reputational damage for their client. 

All firms have partners that make enormous contributions to their firms. (If not, they should not be partners!) What happens when these partners retire? Different firms have different approaches. Many large firms adopt the “cliff” approach – you are no longer a partner so goodbye. At the other extreme some firms allow partners to linger for ever – but to what avail?  

This session will hear some real life stories and will then debate what best practice should be. Within this discussion we will draw out the pros and cons for the firm and for the retiring partner – and the mismatch these opposing views might give rise to and the question of “fairness” between partners.  We will also discuss whether age discrimination legislation helps or hinders the issue.

Hopefully, this debate will provide food for thought for both managing partners as to the best way of retaining the value of retiring partners and equally importantly the thought processes that retiring partners should go through about the value they can best add.

Reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and giving the world a chance of limiting a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius requires a complete transformation of how we power our daily lives and the global economy. In this panel, we aim to analyse and discuss the energy transition from fossil-based systems of energy production and consumption to renewable energy sources, the use of clean hydrogen and other low-emission fuels, regulatory framework, technology developments, financing, universal energy access and employment.

Disputes over the division and recovery of assets are commonplace in litigations, particularly upon death and divorce.  In the case of luxury and eclectic assets, those disputes are even more complicated.  This session will cover the complicated issues involved in the division and recovery of such assets depending upon whether such assets are:

• divisible, indivisible or hard to divide;
• moveable or immovable;
• appreciating, wasting or static.

This will include assets such as boats, planes, spaceships, real estate, oil and gas interests, crypto currencies, NFT’s, art (collections), jewelry (collections), and wine (collections).

Why, really, is judicial independence so important?  And what actions or non-actions from the judiciary are viewed by some countries as evidencing a lack of independence?  What countries struggle with judicial independence?  What advice can a neutral source provide to those countries to make changes if changes would be helpful?  This interesting panel of judges and lawyers from a variety of countries will look at some tough issues and talk through the challenges to achieve judicial independence and the value it can provide to individuals, the business sector, and government.

Digital Assets 

The rise of the digital economy in the second decade of the 21st century is significantly transforming the global financial markets. Innovative technologies in the form of, for instance, blockchain and distributed ledgers and digital assets held and/or traded on them, are offering fundamentally new ways to provide financial services, disrupting traditional trading, investment, payments, borrowing and saving, with the potential for enhanced efficiency, speed and accessibility. The panels in this showcase session will aim to address the above issues, key opportunities and risks and other key developments as outlined in the following topics:

1.    Digital assets: what are they and how have they already become relevant to us all?

What are these new types of assets enabled by distributed ledger technology (DLT), e.g. the blockchain?
•    Crypto currencies (such as payment tokens)
•    Utility tokens (tokens which are intended to provide digital access to an application or service)
•    Asset tokens (digital assets, e.g. representing assets such as participations in real physical underlyings, companies, or earnings streams, or an entitlement to dividends or interest payments)
•    Stablecoins
•    NFTs

Traditional instruments and commodities that have been digitised on the blockchain
•    Central bank digital currency 
•    Digital securities (e.g. digital/tokenised bonds/shares/fund units/structured products)
•    Tokenised deposits
•    Crypto commodities
•    Derivatives referencing digital assets

2.    Adapting private law to the digital asset ecosystem: how to reconcile DLTs controlled or initiated (often anonymously) by users with a traditional private law and conflicts of laws regime and state regulation?  

•    Property rights – establishing ownership and title
•    Custody by third parties
•    Conveyances and other transfers
•    Secured transactions
•    Securitisation of digital assets
•    Contracts vs smart contracts
•    DeFi - applications based on blockchain infrastructures, which facilitate financial market applications such as trading or credit transactions using open-access blockchain infrastructures to handle financial transactions largely automatically and without the involvement of traditional financial intermediaries
•    Are current laws and regulations sufficiently suitable and robust to support safe and efficient digital assets transactions?

3.    Discussion of the causes of the collapses of global crypto firms and how to track and recover crypto assets

•    FTX case study: real-world impact/examples/stories 
•    3AC
•    Voyager, Celsius
•    BlockFi
•    Regulatory compliance systems (AML/CFT, sanctions, FCPA/anti-corruption, etc.)
•    How have prosecutors, investigators, and regulators utilised DLT to track criminal transactions?

4.    Policy discussion: is the crypto founders’ dream to decentralise and democratise finance still viable?

•    The impact of decentralisation and distribution on the financial ecosystem: issues of fragmentation, reliance on third party services, governance, responsibility of identifiable entities, etc.
•    Are traditional intermediaries really obsolete?
•    Social costs and social benefits of DeFi and crypto products
•    Impact of predictive power of public opinion on social media platforms in context with crypto trading 
•    The illicit use of digital assets through fundraisings to finance criminal and/or terrorist activities
•    The discussion around CBDCs, again

5.    Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain

AI-powered digital marketplaces
-    Scope and implications
-    Applications (e.g. infrastructures, insurance, financial services) 
-    Machine learning models (e.g. verifying integrity of credit scoring models or securing data processing)
AI crypto currencies

6.    Regulatory responses and private law remedies in the context of investment losses in digital assets 

•    Regulatory responses (domestic and globally)
•    Legislation (including by regulation)
•    Application of insolvency regimes to digital asset businesses; segregation of digital assets held by custodians
•    Private litigation
•    Criminal prosecution
•    Recovery and the role of insurance in case of lost or stolen keys
•    Macroeconomic impact on “real” economy
•    Preventing systemic risk from crypto activities and the importance of harmonising the legal and regulatory regimes for crypto assets

7.    Impact on legal professionals and the wider legal profession

•    Providing opinions on holding, pledging, payments and settlement of crypto and digital assets
•    Legal certainty regarding privilege and confidentiality of communication on DLT
•    How lawyers can drive positive change for their clients

8.    Q & A interaction