United Kingdom: Law Practice Management

In-house legal departments are being asked to fund AI initiatives by reallocating existing budgets, but new survey data reveals a critical constraint: 86% of legal leaders cannot shift money between budget categories without approval from managers or CFOs. This creates a fundamental tension between the expectation that legal will self-fund AI transformation and the reality that most teams lack the authority to restructure their budgets independently.

Many of Shepherd and Wedderburn's clients who are engaged in philanthropy choose to do so anonymously.

The 34th edition of our Global Survey of Accounting Assumptions for Defined Benefit Plans comprises 1,000 companies in 47 countries.

Employers seeking to hire international workers under UK sponsored visa routes must navigate the complex process of issuing Certificates of Sponsorship. Understanding the different types of CoS, eligibility requirements, associated costs, and application procedures is essential to avoid severe consequences and ensure compliance with immigration regulations.

Employees are increasingly using AI to draft workplace grievances, creating lengthy, legalistic complaints that can obscure simple concerns. While AI can help structure complaints and improve accessibility, it also risks escalating conflicts, introducing data protection issues, and making resolution harder. HR teams must now balance fair treatment of AI-assisted grievances with practical, proportionate responses that focus on the real issues rather than managing overly complex documents.

Somewhere in your organisation, an employee is using AI right now. They may be drafting emails with it, summarising documents, screening CVs, or feeding client data into a tool whose privacy settings nobody has checked. Most businesses have reached this point without a policy, without training, and without any clear picture of what that exposure looks like.

The aerospace and defence sector faces a critical workforce challenge: how to attract, develop and retain talent in an era of rapid technological change and geopolitical uncertainty. With skills shortages intensifying and demand for specialist expertise growing, organisations must rethink their approach to building adaptable, diverse teams capable of delivering innovation across emerging technologies and complex operational environments.

Understanding the UK Home Office's "genuine vacancy" requirement is critical for Skilled Worker visa applications. This article examines how employers can demonstrate that a sponsored role truly exists and wasn't created primarily to facilitate immigration, exploring key evidence factors from company size and financial health to recruitment records and family connections.

The Open University's latest Business Barometer report uncovers how persistent skills shortages across UK organisations are creating ripple effects on employee wellbeing and operational capacity. The research examines employer perspectives on retention strategies, recruitment challenges, and training investments, while investigating whether young talent could provide solutions to the widening skills gap.

I can’t remember the last time a managing partner asked me which model scored higher on a benchmark. I can remember plenty of conversations about governance, adoption, security, and whether AI can actually work with the firm’s knowledge.

Nobody builds systems that way anymore, which is roughly his point about the systems everyone is building today. He thinks large language models are simply the current enabling technology, and that in 10 years we’ll find it remarkable that we ever thought this was how you did AI

Moving from scattered experimentation to a structured approach legal teams can actually adopt. Ask a law firm CIO or corporate legal leader whether the organization has rolled out AI, and the honest answer may depend on where they look.