The duties of company directors are set out in the Companies Act 2006 and include the duties to promote the company’s success and to act with reasonable care, skill, and diligence. In carrying out these duties, directors must have regard - amongst other things - to the impact of the company's operations on the community and the environment, and the likely consequences of any decision in the long term. These, and other recent developments in the expectations of how directors should perform their duties, mean that promoting a company’s success includes paying due regard to the impact on the environment. However, do directors have a duty to be “green”?

The massive increase in late payments and bad debt in the current economic climate are putting significant pressure on businesses of all sizes. There are steps that businesses can take to mitigate these difficulties, including engaging the support of experts to help achieve the best possible outcomes.

Umbrellas are useful at this time of the year, as the seasons change and the misty drizzle returns. But the right umbrella is critical: if it isn’t sturdy and wind-resistant it may not keep you dry. The same is true of umbrella companies that are used by agency workers, contractors, and self-employed professionals to manage their payroll administration.

James Brookes, a chartered surveyor working for Complex Development Projects (CDP), has a wealth of experience when it comes to working collaboratively on urban regeneration projects. Here he shares the benefits of this approach and tells us why he is full of admiration for CDP’s managing director, Ian Harrabin MBE.

With artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly advancing, the UK held the first ever AI Safety Summit (Summit) at Bletchley Park on 1 November and 2 November 2023 aiming to consider the risks of AI and discuss how they can be mitigated through internationally coordinated action.

'Hope value' was originally introduced to ensure that landowners would receive existing use value (EUV) of their land, plus a premium to reflect future lost earnings. Many now argue that such payments are anachronistic and responsible for the artificial inflation of land prices, so the the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 (LURA) now gives the Secretary of State the ability to remove, or cap, hope value from CPO-related compensation payments.

In Thaler v Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks [2023] UKSC 49, following a series of appeals by Dr Thaler, on 20 December 2023 the UK Supreme Court (Court) unanimously ruled that a machine acting autonomously and powered by artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be an “inventor” under the Patents Act of 1997 (UK) (Act), as an “inventor” must be a natural person. This decision is consistent with decisions in other jurisdictions on the same application, namely Germany, Australia and the U.S.

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We discuss in this article the different types of exits when selling a business that we regularly see in the M&A community.

Both proprietary and promissory estoppel are legal doctrines designed to stop a party from reneging on a promise that they have made to another party which has relied on that promise to their detriment. Proprietary estoppel is primarily concerned with land and property, whereas promissory estoppel claims concern other assets and are usually associated with an adjustment of a pre-existing contractual relationship between parties.