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BPP Legal Awareness Society



About the BPP Legal Awareness Society

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The BPP Legal Awareness Society was founded in January 2011 at BPP Business School, The City, London. The aim of the Society is to consider how key decisions are made in corporate strategy by corporate clients, and to consider further the importance of commercial and corporate lawyers in promoting business success.

Whilst currently based at BPP Law School in Holborn (as of January 2012), the Society continues to generate much goodwill and a good reputation across the whole of England, in part due to its very active efforts in the social media. The Society prides itself on inclusivity and accessibility, and is therefore open to all past, current, and future members of BPP, in all disciplines, across all sites.

 

How to contact the BPP Legal Awareness Society

To contact the Society over anything, please e-mail us at: legalaware1213@gmail. Alternatively, tweet Shibley, the Society’s current President, directly at @legalaware. We should be particularly keen if you would like to offer input into the ‘Corporate Client Strategy’ project, described below, if you, as a lawyer, are interested in how business strategy is taught at GDL/LLB(Hons) or LPC level to law students, or if you would like to take part as a guest in the podcasting project; you do not have to have trained or taught at BPP to be able to contribute.

The ‘Legal Aware’ flagship blog

Our blog contains up-to-date corporate and commercial news, as well as educational videos (http://legal-aware.org). You might find it useful in preparation for training contract interviews, inter alia.

Our meetings

The BPP Legal Awareness Society as in previous terms will be holding fortnightly meetings during term time at BPP Law School. For timetables of previous meetings which we have held please go to the following links: Jun – Dec 2011Jan – May 2012, and May – August 2012. You will notice that our meetings consider in detail common practice areas of international commercial and corporate professional legal work, and also the online psychometric verbal reasoning tests used by the majority of City law firms in their selection process.

Activities

These provide information about how to get involved in activities of the Society:

The brand new ‘Corporate Client Strategy’ project of the BPP Legal Awareness Society

This is a brand new initiative which we are launching for the 2012/3 academic year. The aim is for students who are current members of the Society to research in detail the corporate strategy of clients of their choice using only information in the public domain (these may be firms that they may be dealing with in their training contracts, for example). Then, these students give mini-presentations on their findings, suggesting how commercial and corporate law can be used innovatively to create competitive advantage for the corporate client, thus maximising shareholder dividend. We anticipate that students who are yet to secure a training contract may seek to be involved with this new project, as evidence of ‘commercial awareness’ for the training contract application form.

Take part in blogging for Legal Aware

Blogging is an excellent mechanism of knowledge sharing, and creating networks of like-minded individuals. Our popular blog is read by people from a number of different backgrounds, including junior and senior lawyers, professionals in business, finance and economics, and current, past and future GDL/LPC/LLM students. The blog is currently updated virtually daily, and we are looking for a small team of writers to take responsibility for producing accurate, intelligent and thought-provoking articles based on the contemporary commercial and corporate news, for publication on the blog. All authors will be given their own admin credentials for the blog, and there will be minimal editorial input. All posts will necessarily conform to the current SRA Code of Conduct (LPC student edition).

Apply to be a member of the executive steering committee of the BPP Legal Awareness Society

The BPP Legal Awareness Society executive committee runs on the basis of the ‘cluster’ basis of management. These means that executive committee members tend to have defined roles, such as internal publicity across various sites, liaising with internal stakeholders, arranging meetings at Holborn, taking responsibility for podcasting (see below), but will participate in running the society according to demands of the Society within BPP. This allows flexibility according to our needs, and encourages teamwork amongst our team members. We will this year be asking students to prepare a short CV of their relevant background, education and/or experience, at the least, as we should wish all members of our committee to pull their weight and not to require prompting to do things.

Be a member of our podcasting team

In this academic year, we are especially keen to produce podcasts and widely distribute them. If this project is successful, we wish to make our Legal Aware podcasts available for free subscription on the internet through the iStore. The podcasts are produced by members of our podcast team, who research and discuss topics of their own choosing. This is our last podcast (from the last academic year) on the changing nature of legal education, in response to the ongoing ‘Legal Education and Training Review’. This initiative relies heavily on the competences of attention-to-detail, proactivity, commercial awareness and teamwork.

Verbal reasoning psychometric tests for training contract applications

The Society has also been involved in an initiative for law students to improve their performance in verbal reasoning psychometric tests for training contracts (“Legal Recruit”). This initiative is entirely separate from the teaching provided by BPP.

Educational videos

 

 

 

Factsheets: Please feel free to download and print for personal use, but the Legal Recruit project would be very grateful if you could observe the terms of use contained in the copyright statement at the end.  These factsheets are not endorsed by BPP Careers, and they have had no input at all from BPP Careers.

Background to online testing

Background to verbal reasoning tests

Background to situational judgement tests

Background to competences

Background to difficulties and online assessments 

 

 

25 September 2012

Sexy regulation and the City



 

This is an extremely issue. My title belies the fact that I strongly feel that the City builds competitive advantage by not only complying with the law, but also acting strategically to use the law to outperform international competitors. It simply can’t be understood through the psychodrama spectacles of Osborne, Brown or Balls.

There has been a general undercurrent that the City’s “competitive advantage” comes from the unique way in which the City has a ‘light touch on regulation’. Fraud, which has gone unnoticed in Barclays, is still undoubtedly a criminal offence, and it is simply no sympathy for, as far as the English law is concerned, that Bob Diamond was unaware of criminal activity prior to the formal investigations. Financial regulation, which has been enforced latterly in a number of successes for the Financial Services Authority, has had a most unclear place in ascertaining how the Bank of England (and other central banks) have had an effect on LIBOR.

I have no doubt that George Osborne will want to send out a powerful signal (including to corporate investors internationally) that London is competent on regulation. The ideological desire to cut red-tape should not inadvertently be allowed to become a ‘Criminal’s Charter’ in the City of London. Nick Cohen has elegantly referred to it in a brilliant article entitled ‘Crony Capitalism’, thus:

“Today’s hypocrisies cannot last for two reasons. First the gap between what Conservatives say and what they do will soon become an electoral liability. No centre-right party can expect to prosper if it puts the interests of the state-subsidised rich before the interests of the middle class. Second, inertia is destroying what’s left of the City’s reputation. Unless radical reform begins soon, the world will see it as a pirate state which you visit, rob or be robbed but never to conduct honest business.”

On February 23rd 2006, George Osborne wrote about how wonderful the Irish economy was, how we could all learn lessons from it, before it went bust. This is concluding paragraph of that famous article in the Times by George Osborne:

The new global economy poses real long-term challenges to Britain, but also real opportunities for us to prosper and succeed.  In Ireland they understand this. They have freed their markets, developed the skills of their workforce, encouraged enterprise and innovation and created a dynamic economy. They have much to teach us, if only we are willing to learn.

This is analysed, albeit with a retrospectoscope, as follows in the Financial Times:

“Poor regulation wasn’t a problem identified by Osborne at the time. Indeed, he thought Brown had some lessons to learn from the Irish light touch. He warned that Britain was “falling behind” Ireland: “Poor skill levels, rising taxes, bureaucratic planning controls and chronic overregulation are high on the list of culprits.” 

The contribution of this deregulation to the Irish economy ‘bust’ has been well documented. Here’s an extract ironically from their report on the banking crisis:

 “It appears clear, however, that bank governance and risk management were weak – in some cases disastrously so. This contributed to the crisis through several channels. Credit risk controls failed to prevent severe concentrations in lending on property – including notably on commercial property – as well as high exposures to individual borrowers and a serious overdependence on wholesale funding. It appears that internal procedures were overridden, sometimes systematically. The systemic impact of the governance issues crystallised dramatically with the Government statements that accompanied the nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank. Some governance events are already under investigation. There is a need to probe more widely the scope of governance failings in banks, whether they were of a rather general kind or (apparently in far fewer instances) connected with very serious specific lapses, and whether auditors were sufficiently vigilant in some episodes.”

Finally, this is the article here which I am produced for ‘public interest’ given that George Osborne is currently the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Unfortunately, it has been deleted off the Times website which is most unusual given that the Times archive is otherwise complete and reliable; it also has been recorded for posterity here. The existence of this article on February 23rd 2006 is well evidenced in these articles (example 1example 2,example 3example 4).

“A generation ago, the very idea that a British politician would go to Ireland to see how to run an economy would have been laughable. The Irish Republic was seen as Britain’s poor and troubled country cousin, a rural backwater on the edge of Europe. Today things are different. Ireland stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking, and that is why I am in Dublin: to listen and to learn.After centuries of lower incomes, Irish average incomes are now 20 per cent higher than in the UK. After being held back for decades, the productivity of Irish companies — the yardstick of economic performance — has grown three times as quickly as ours over the past ten years. Young Irish families once emigrated in their millions to seek a better life overseas; these days it is young people across Europe who come to Ireland to find good jobs. Dublin’s main evening newspaper even carries a Polish-language supplement.

Ireland is no longer on the edge of Europe but is instead an Atlantic bridge. High-tech companies such as Intel, Oracle and Apple have chosen to base their European operations there. I will be asking Google executives today why they set up in Dublin, not London. It is the kind of question I wish the Chancellor of the Exchequer was asking.

What has caused this Irish miracle, and how can we in Britain emulate it?Three lessons stand out. First, Ireland’s education system is world-class. On various different rankings it is placed either third or fourth in the world. By contrast, Britain is ranked 33rd and our poor education performance is repeatedly identified by organisations such as the OECD as our greatest weakness. It is not difficult to see why. Staying ahead in a global economy will mean staying at the cutting edge of technological innovation, and using that to boost our productivity. To do that you need the best-educated workforce possible. It is telling that even limited education reform is proving such a struggle for the Prime Minister.

Secondly, the Irish understand that staying ahead in innovation requires world class research and development. Using the best R&D, businesses can grow and make the most of the huge opportunities that exist in the world. That is why it is shocking that the level of R&D spending actually fell in Britain last year. Ireland’s intellectual property laws give incentives for companies to innovate, and the tax system gives huge incentives to turn R&D into the finished article. No tax is paid on revenue from intellectual property where the underlying R&D work was carried out in Ireland. While the Treasury here fiddles with its complex R&D tax credit system, I want to examine whether we could not adopt elements of Ireland’s simple and effective approach.

Thirdly, in a world where cheap, rapid communication means that investment decisions are made on a global basis, capital will go wherever investment is most attractive. Ireland’s business tax rates are only 12.5 per cent, while Britain’s are becoming among the highest in the developed world.

Economic stability must come before promises of tax cuts. If, over time, you reduce the share of national income taken by the State, then you can share the proceeds of growth between investment in public services and sustainably lower taxes. In Britain, the Left have us stuck debating a false choice. They suggest you have to choose between lower taxes and public services. Yet in Ireland they have doubled spending on public services in the past decade while reducing taxes and shrinking the State’s share of national income. So not only does Ireland now have lower business and income taxes than the UK, there are also twice as many hospital beds per head of population.

World-class education, high rates of innovation and an attractive climate for investment: these are all elements that have helped to raise productivity in Ireland. It is not the only advanced economy to have achieved this uplift. Last week in Washington the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, told me about the impact that the sustained increase in productivity growth had made in generating prosperity in the US. By contrast, in Britain productivity growth has fallen in recent years and is far behind the likes of the US and Ireland. Indeed, it is one fifth the rate it was when Gordon Brown walked into the Treasury. Poor skill levels, rising taxes, bureaucratic planning controls and chronic overregulation are high on the list of culprits. Britain is being left behind.

Faced with the extraordinary rise of economies such as China, India and Brazil, many European governments seem to have accepted that long-term decline is inevitable. I detect a similar pessimism here. How on earth, people ask, will we ever compete in such a fiercely competitive world? The Chancellor’s answer is to put up the shutters and stick on a path of ever-higher taxation and an ever-growing State. But you cannot shut out the future.

The new global economy poses real long-term challenges to Britain, but also real opportunities for us to prosper and succeed. In Ireland they understand this. They have freed their markets, developed the skills of their workforce, encouraged enterprise and innovation and created a dynamic economy. They have much to teach us, if only we are willing to learn.”

Even if there is no judicial-led inquiry, we need to learn lessons about the importance of regulation and the City.

BPP has competitive advantage in offering a holistic business law education, I feel



A lot of my education latterly has been at Masters level in business and in the law.

We can argue til the cows come home about the relative merits of the Graduate Diploma in Law in offering a necessary and sufficient education in law for non-law graduates like me. This will, I have no doubt, rumble on in the next few years, against a complex backdrop of private vs public education, tuition fees, the Legal Education and Training Review, whether we need a ‘law curriculum’ and if so what should be in it.

We can also argue relentlessly about the Legal Practice Course. I personally feel that it strikes a right balance in its core subjects, civil and criminal litigation, business law and practice, and property law and practice. We also receive an education in accounts and professional conduct (in comparison to the undergraduate assessment requirements of the General Medical Council, to my knowledge), practical legal research, advocacy, interviewing and assessing.

Latterly, however, I did an excellent Masters course at the College of Law, which I’m well known to be fond of. I thought that the way in which their programme is delivered through distance learning is extremely well organised, and gave me a brilliant education in practical training as well as academic perspectives of specialised domains of international commercial law (such as equity finance, share acquisitions or intellectual property).

I am currently studying at BPP Law School, having trained thus far virtually completely at Cambridge (apart from 30 months at the College of Law). I would say that the pastoral care which I have received is second-to-none. For example, I unexpectedly went into a six week coma (due to acute meningitis) during my GDL. Fiona (the Learning Support Officer) and my late father, while I was on a life support machine, communicated endlessly – so I was told by my father – to ensure I could stay on the course. I did complete this course in September 2008, even ‘upgrading’ to a LLB(Hons). I have some friends from the weekends when I attended for classes, with my father. I was in a wheelchair at the time, and Michelle and Gill (from BPP at Waterloo reception and the common room at Holborn respectively) offer reminisce about this period in my life with me.

That however is not where I think the source of the competitive advantage of BPP is. I think, fundamentally, it would be very hard for the College of Law to build up a formidable reputation in finance, accountancy, tax, business and marketing overnight. These happily co-exist in the BPP Business Schools, with BPP achieving every year some of the best CIMA professional accountancy exam results in the country. I cannot even begin to explain how the MBA which I completed earlier this year for a two-week overlap with my LPC has fundamentally improved my understanding of management accounting, markets and marketing, organisations and leadership, international marketing, strategy and operations management, advanced strategy implementation, and innovation. I have the opportunity to pass this on with new and old friends of mine at the BPP Legal Awareness Society, a society based in Holborn, but which is open and inclusive for all BPP students of all disciplines.

I look forward to seeing BPP excel in a very harsh international competitive climate. I feel BPP is second-to-none in terms of offering a holistic business law education, though people who know me will know I am also extremely loyal to Cambridge and the College of Law where I also trained.

I love the City



I actually love the City! My father used to wonder why I loved the City so much, during those dark days when I was working 80 hours a week for the NHS and hated it. Sure – the guys work hard in the City, but it’s just so much my kind of work. I am fully committed to my dementia research work, but I am very lucky I can do it ‘from a safe distance’. I am internationally well respected as one of the only experts in frontal variant frontotemporal dementia, and I wouldn’t change that in the world!

But I love the way the City thrives on teamwork to get results. The law has some extremely bright, charismatic, people on it who can understand the competitive advantage of their transactions, and can understand how to make them work even considering complicated extra-jurisdictional issues. When I travel to my Business School, I have an enormous sense of pride – especially so on a hot summer’s day for some reason. Indeed, the City reminds me of my happy days at Cambridge as a student (I was there for a decade), and especially my father.

 

 

 

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