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R (Greyhound Board of Great Britain Ltd) v Welsh Ministers [2026] EWHC 670 (Admin) What are the practical implications of this case? The ruling reinforces the constitutional divide between the courts and the legislature. It explains that the scheme and framework of the Government of Wales Act 2006 (GWA 2006) embody that separation of powers, and that any judicial attempt to recognise and enforce a common law obligation on Welsh Ministers to consult prior to introducing legislation in the Senedd would trespass upon that boundary. This is not a departure from established principle; case law has already upheld comparable rules for lawmakers in Scotland and at Westminster. However, this is the first express confirmation of the position for Welsh lawmakers, and the first time this dimension of the GWA 2006 has been analysed in such depth. The court examined earlier
The solution arrived through the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), a quasi‑judicial body handling mass claims, created under UN Security Council Resolution 687. By addressing environmental harm—most notably via its ‘F4’ claim class—the UNCC set a seminal benchmark shaping how international law and contemporary arbitral panels allocate financial responsibility for wartime ecological devastation. With present-day wars in areas such as Eastern Europe and the Middle East bringing dam breaches, strikes on chemical facilities, and the burning of farmland, the UNCC’s legacy endures as an essential reference point for states, global investors, and companies engaged in post‑conflict arbitration. The F4 claims: Quantifying the unquantifiable Prior to the 1990s, mechanisms in international law for war reparations overwhelmingly favoured property loss, foregone earnings, and bodily injury. The natural world was commonly treated as a mute, non-compensable victim of armed hostilities...
Understanding the farming business as a business Many farms still use long-standing structures that arose by habit, not strategy. Sole traders, informal partnerships and outdated partnership deeds are common. While once effective, such setups can cause major issues around succession, tax planning and involving the next generation. A corporate team can take a fresh, business-led view of the farm, asking: Who owns the land and other critical assets? Who manages daily operations? Who carries the risk and who enjoys the return? What is the enduring plan for succession? From this review, the team can confirm whether the current setup is fit for purpose or if an alternative — for example an updated partnership agreement, a company, a limited liability partnership, or a blended model — would better meet the family’s aims. Tax efficiency through joined-up advice Tax sits at the centre of most
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In this issue: Data protection Information technology New technologies Internet Advertising, marketing and sponsorship Telecommunications Lex Talk®TMT: a Lexis®Nexis community Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Latest Q& A Useful information Data protection Data ( Use and Access) Act 2025 ( Commencement No 2) Regulations 2025 SI 2025/982: Section 124 of the Data ( Use and Access) Act 2025, on retention of information by internet service providers following the death of a child, takes effect on 30 September 2025. See LNB News 05/09/2025 23. Balancing data protection and online safety—the ICO’s new guidance on profiling tools Information Law analysis: Jose Saras, partner, and Xavier Prida, associate, at Preiskel LLP, review the Information Commissioner’s Office ( ICO) guidance on profiling tools for online safety and how it aligns with the...
On 30 July 2025, the Information Commissioner’s Office ( ICO) released refreshed guidance on how ‘profiling tools’ are used within trust and safety workflows by relevant actors. The document clarifies key data protection and privacy issues for those undertaking profiling, to meet obligations under UK data protection legislation and the Online Safety Act 2023 ( OSA 2023). It is aimed at relevant parties engaged in trust and safety functions. Profiling Article 4(4) of the Assimilated Regulation ( EU) 2016/679 ( UK GDPR) describes profiling as any automated processing of personal data employed to assess certain personal facets of an individual, notably a person’s job performance, financial circumstances, health, and other traits or behaviours. Profiling tools are the mechanisms that ingest, analyse, and produce assessments or forecasts about personal characteristics inferred from someone’s data. Organisations deploy these tools chiefly to spot and curb harmful online conduct,...
Peter Dunn v Kostas Kazolides [2025] EWHC 2212 ( Ch) Mr Dunn, a former chartered accountant and insolvency practitioner, brought a claim for almost £9m against Mr Kazolides. The High Court held that Mr Kazolides (represented at trial by Dov Ohrenstein of Radcliffe Chambers and Canfields Law Solicitors) had given a guarantee in relation to a Cypriot company that owed substantial sums to Mr Dunn, yet the claim was dismissed. How could Mr Kazolides nevertheless prevail in his defence and avoid any liability to pay under the guarantee? By way of background, under a joint venture agreement, Mr Dunn advanced funds to the company to finance the development and sale of seven villas in Cyprus. The agreement stipulated that the loan became repayable upon ‘the insolvency of the company’ and, as the judge found, it also contained a guarantee from Mr...
Sky UK Ltd v Office of Communications [2025] EWCA Civ 1118 What are the practical implications of this case? The Court of Appeal upheld the CAT’s ruling that Sky’s pay‑television service delivered via digital satellite ( Sky Pay TV Service) qualifies as an ECS. As a result, the General Conditions of Entitlement ( GCs) governing ECSs bite in full, including consumer safeguards that oblige ECS providers to issue end‑of‑contract notifications ( Eo CNs) to customers. In practical terms, the decision confirms that blended content/transmission offerings ( Hybrid Services)—even where content is the principal element—do not escape ECS categorisation or the consequent GC obligations. Providers of Hybrid Services (or their connectivity partners) should determine who bears responsibility to end users for conveyance functions, as this is pivotal to whether ECS status arises. The judgment also settles a two‑stage framework for assessing ECS designation for Hybrid...
A proposed collective claim against a UK music copyright collective over allegedly unfair sharing of royalty payments has been stopped from proceeding to trial, judges at the CAT ruled on 27 August 2025. In refusing to certify the claim for trial, the UK specialist antitrust court concluded that the PRS had succeeded in a summary judgment application, which brings a case to an end before trial where it has no realistic prospect of success. Claim leader David Rowntree—the drummer from British rock band Blur—sought compensation from the PRS for thousands of songwriters. The claim targets ‘black box’ royalties: sums that cannot be matched and paid to the correct artist because of administrative and clerical issues, including missing or incorrect data. Rowntree contends that the PRS’s approach to handling these royalties has produced unfair...
From 2 August 2026, the EU’s landmark AI Act will require firms such as Open AI, Google and Meta to apply machine-readable labels to material produced by Chat GPT, Gemini and similar systems, indicating whether content is machine-generated or has been manipulated. The legislation also charges the European Commission with guiding the development of a voluntary code of practice to support the effective roll-out of this labelling duty. Early groundwork for the code has been laid through expert studies examining technical methods to mark content by type. Preparatory studies At a technical workshop on 4 September 2025, AI companies, experts and other stakeholders will be shown the preliminary findings from these studies. The text study was overseen by Giovanni Puccetti, associate professor at the University of Milan; the audio work was led by Xavier Serra and Martin Rocamore, professors at Barcelona’s University Pompeu Fabra; and the image and...
In this issue: Information technology Internet Data protection Advertising, marketing and sponsorship Telecommunications Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information Information technology On 26 June 2025, the European Parliament’s Committee on Employment and Social Affairs released a draft report urging the European Commission to commence the law‑making process for an EU directive on algorithmic management in the workplace. Dan Cooper, partner, Antonio Michaelides, of counsel, Sam Jungyun Choi and Matthieu Coget, associates, and Matsumoto Ryoko, visiting lawyer, at Covington & Burling LLP, examine the report’s conclusions. See News Analysis: European Parliament Committee Recommends Commission to Propose EU Directive on Algorithmic Management. Internet The Chartered Trading Standards Institute ( CTSI) has issued revised Guidance for Traders on Pricing Practices, applicable from August 2025. Supplanting all earlier editions, the guidance explains how trader obligations are to be interpreted under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 ( DMCCA 2024). It...
What is the purpose of PRMA 2025? PRMA 2025 obtained Royal Assent on 21 July 2025 and, apart from PRMA 2025, s 11(1) and (3), took effect that same day. As enabling legislation, it empowers the Secretary of State to make regulations to manage a wide spectrum of product safety risks and associated matters. On 22 July 2025, the Office of Product Safety and Standards (‘ OPSS’) issued a companion Code of Conduct that explains how government will exercise the powers granted under PRMA 2025. Why has PRMA 2025 been introduced? For years the UK’s product safety regime was shaped strongly by EU legislation. In the wake of Brexit, there was an increasing need for a distinct UK framework capable of evolving independently. At the same time, new hazards have appeared that the previous laws were not designed to deal with, including unsafe goods sold via online...
How can websites best preserve privacy in tracking users’ consent to targeted online advertising? A landmark Belgian court decision has triggered a rethink of how sites safeguard privacy while logging consent for targeted ads. Spurred by the Brussels Market Court’s May 2025 ruling against adtech trade body IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework ( TCF) — a consent tool broadly deployed across the EU (see here) — German university professor Max von Grafenstein, founder of legal tech venture Law & Innovation Technology, is designing a fresh mechanism to record and relay consent throughout the ad ecosystem. The IAB proceedings are under close observation because they grapple with fundamental questions about the boundaries of personal data and the identification of controllers. Hundreds of websites and advertisers depend on the TCF to satisfy EU data protection requirements when seeking permission to deliver...
The draft report characterises algorithmic management as the deployment of automated tools—including those using artificial intelligence—to supervise, evaluate, or take decisions that impact workers and solo self‑employed individuals. It builds on a Commission study released in March 2025, which concluded that, although current EU rules, such as Regulation 2016/679, the General Data Protection Regulation ( EU GDPR), mitigate certain risks to workers arising from algorithmic management, other risks persist. That study further acknowledges that the AI Act does not confer dedicated rights on workers where AI is applied, a point flagged as problematic. The draft also attaches proposed wording for a new directive governing algorithmic management at work. The European Parliament has not, at this stage, given its approval to the draft report yet......
In this issue: Data protection Media Information technology Advertising, marketing and sponsorship Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information Data protection From stalemate to statute— DUAA 2025’s journey and the key data protection and e Privacy changes This News Analysis explores the principal shifts to data protection and e Privacy law stemming from the Data ( Use and Access) Act 2025 ( DUAA 2025), which obtained Royal Assent in June 2025, and sets out how organisations should ready themselves for these developments. Written by Bryony Long, partner and co-head, and Zahra Laher, knowledge lawyer, at Lewis Silkin. See News Analysis: From stalemate to statute—the Data ( Use and Access) Act’s journey and the key data protection and e Privacy...
On 14 August 2025, Getty told a federal judge in Delaware it would discontinue its case in that venue and pursue the dispute in the Northern District of California, the forum British startup Stability AI had argued was the proper setting. On the same day, Getty lodged a fresh complaint in San Francisco’s federal court, asserting the startup had infringed its rights on “a staggering scale.” Getty had first brought proceedings in February 2023, alleging Stability copied millions of images from its online collection to help create Stable Diffusion, an AI image generator. To achieve this, Stability altered or removed copyright management data tied to the images, Getty claimed......
Trustees of AFM and SAG- AFTRA Intellectual Property Rights Distribution Fund and others v The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology [2025] EWHC 1944 ( Ch) What are the practical implications of this case? This ruling may pave the way for substantial cross-border disputes in the music royalties arena. It brings several practical consequences: ongoing relevance of EU-derived substantive rights post- Brexit: the decision shows that claims for equitable remuneration grounded in EU standards can still be advanced, particularly where domestic law departed from those obligations (namely, Francovich damages). In this matter, UK law meant that a performer’s status as a US national yielded only a limited right to equitable remuneration (broadly aligned with protection in the US). By contrast, the EU stance is more generous representative proceedings: the court’s readiness to allow four performers (claimants 9–12) to act as...
How have plans for UK data protection reform evolved since Brexit? Since Brexit, the UK’s approach to data protection reform has ebbed and flowed markedly, with successive governments seeking to carefully balance innovation, economic growth and individuals’ rights. The Conservative government aimed to pivot to a GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation) lite regime by introducing the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill. That bill outlined a series of business‑friendly amendments to existing data protection rules and progressed reasonably well through parliament, only to be ultimately shelved following a change of government in 2024. Once in office, the Labour‑led administration reignited the agenda, bringing forward the Data ( Use and Access) Bill ( DUAB). While retaining the core UK GDPR framework, DUAB set out targeted reforms that indicate a shift towards a more UK‑specific regime centred on data‑driven innovation, enhanced public services and strong data...
In this issue: New technologies Media Advertising, marketing and sponsorship Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information New technologies EU’s core data-disclosure requirement for AI models sparks confusion MLex: The European Commission has unveiled a template obliging AI developers to reveal training data under the EU AI Act. Yet a crucial rule—naming the top 10% of domains gathered by crawling—remains ill-defined. The uncertainty is whether this list should be by content type (modality) or presented as a single total. How to factor in the size of content adds further doubt. Such loose drafting could nudge AI companies towards minimal disclosure. The Commission is working on additional guidance, but has so far offered no comment. Further reading: EU’s core data-disclosure requirement for AI models sparks confusion. UK product liability reform—new redress rules for AI systems? Life Sciences analysis: The UK Law Commission has launched a new project to...
The Commission has unveiled a standard form that AI makers falling under the EU AI Act must use to set out the data fed into their systems. Yet the reach of one of its most contentious obligations is still not, as yet, defined. Under the EU AI Act, creators of general‑purpose models, including Open AI, Anthropic and Google, must release a ‘sufficiently detailed summary’ describing the training data that were used to train their models. What counts as ‘sufficiently detailed’ follows a compulsory template issued by the EU executive on 24 July 2025. Models are built on vast datasets, for which information is often scarce or incomplete in practice. The summary aims to help parties with a legitimate interest—such as data subjects and rights holders—assert their rights under EU law. But a fiercely disputed disclosure item in the...
The draft guidance sits within the overhauled consumer protection framework brought in by the DMCCA 2024 in the UK, substantial elements of which took effect in April 2025. For the first time, under the DMCCA 2024 the CMA can enforce consumer protection law directly via administrative processes, rather than having to pursue consumer rights through court proceedings. The CMA also holds fresh authority to levy penalties of up to 10% of worldwide turnover for infringements of consumer protection law. The CMA had earlier indicated it intended to publish definitive guidance on price transparency in Autumn 2025 and, until that final guidance is issued, said it will only pursue enforcement against ‘genuinely unexpected and untrailed mandatory charges added on at the end of a purchasing journey’. Why is price transparency important? DMCCA 2024 refreshed the legal framework to shield consumers from unfair trading, including...
A rift is opening across the UK financial services sector over the fate of digital money. At the centre of the split are comments by Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, who has again dampened expectations that stablecoins could stand in for bank-issued money. Incumbent finance has cheered; the fintech world is notably less enthused. Bailey, who also chairs the Financial Stability Board, is helping to shape the UK’s regulatory stance on stablecoins—cryptoassets tied to the likes of the dollar or sterling and typically issued by private companies. In several recent addresses, he signalled a preference for banks to tokenise existing deposits via distributed ledger technology rather than adopt stablecoins. He has also grown more cautious about the Bank of England’s own digital pound initiative. ‘ I would much rather [banks] go down the “tokenised deposits” street and say, “how do we...
In this issue: New technologies Internet Advertising, marketing and sponsorship Lex Talk®TMT: a Lexis®Nexis community Daily and weekly news alerts New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Useful information New technologies General-purpose AI rules under EU AI Act start to apply on 2 August The European Commission has put the principal governance arrangements for the EU AI Act in place ahead of the 2 August 2025 implementation deadline. The European AI Board, made up of EU Member States, is now in operation. By 2 August, Member States must appoint national competent authorities to implement, oversee and enforce AI system requirements, investigate compliance, nominate notified bodies for pre-market approvals, and create regulatory sandboxes. The Commission has also set rules for a Scientific Panel of independent specialists and opened applications for both the Panel and the EU AI Act...
Fridriksson v Samherji Hf [2025] EWHC 1873 ( Ch) What are the practical implications of the case? This judgment offers useful direction on the outer limits of conduct that can be acknowledged as freedom of expression, the court’s approach to weighing competing provisions under the European Convention on Human Rights (the ‘ Convention’), and the circumstances in which freedom of expression may operate as a defence to alleged intellectual property right infringement. On the summary judgment application, the defendant contended that there should be no boundary to what counts as freedom of expression, encompassing his actions here. The Master held that where rights collide they must be measured by their respective importance in the specific context of the clash. In these circumstances, the Master concluded that the defendant’s invocation of Article 10 of the Convention to resist the transfer of the domain name and the...
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When evaluating a general damages claim, the practitioner ought initially to refer to the Judicial College Guidelines (JCG)...
This Practice Note This Practice Note reviews mechanisms used in settling litigation. A Tomlin order consists of a consent order paired with a schedule. It operates to stay proceedings on terms that have been agreed. The provisions contained in the schedule may remain confidential. This Practice Note describes the scope of confidentiality attaching to the schedule and sets out how it differs from a standard consent order. Sample wording for a Tomlin order is included, alongside links to precedents, as well as guidance on court approval. It also addresses varying, setting aside and enforcing a Tomlin order, including the considerations the court will take into account when handling applications for each. Further guidance is provided on interpreting and applying the relevant provisions of the CPR; however, some courts and divisions impose very specific requirements for both drafting and approval, and for approaching the schedule and confidentiality issues. Accordingly, you must consider the particular rules and court guide provisions in the forum where your claim is proceeding when drawing up the Tomlin order...
Date [ date ] Parties [ name of Landlord ] [ of OR incorporated in England and Wales (company registration number [ number ]) with its registered office at ] [ address ] (Landlord) [ name of Tenant ] [ of OR incorporated in England and Wales (company registration number [ number ]) with its registered office at ] [ address ] (Tenant) [ [ name of Guarantor ] [ of OR incorporated in England and Wales (company registration number [ number ]) with its registered office at ] [ address ] (Guarantor) ] [ [ name of Mortgagee ] [ of OR incorporated in England and Wales (company registration number [ number ]) with its registered office at ] [ address ] (Mortgagee) ] Definitions Within this Deed, the terms below shall be interpreted as follows: [ Annual Rent • the annual sum reserved under the Lease; ] [ Insurance Rent • the Tenant’s share of the Landlord’s costs of insuring the Property (as set out in the Lease); ] Lease • the lease of the Property dated [ date ], entered into between (1) [ the Landlord OR [ name ...
I, [ name ], of [ address ], solemnly and sincerely state that: [ Matters to be verified, set out in numbered paragraphs ] I make this solemn statement in good conscience, believing it to be true, and pursuant to the provisions of the Statutory Declarations Act 1835. DECLARED at [ details ] this [ day ] day of [ month and year ] Before me ................................................................................ [ signature of the person before whom the declaration is made ] A [ commissioner for oaths OR [ solicitor OR [ insert other qualification ] ] authorised to administer oaths ]...
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