Who Pays for the Long Way Round: Separating Cape Detours from Hormuz Risk
Watch in 1 minute video Major ocean lines and freight forwarders are levying emergency surcharges across global supply chains in response to Middle East disruption. Closer inspection of cargo bills suggests two distinct commercial cost events are being conflated under a single “Middle East Disruption” fee. The Geographic Conflation: Cape Detours vs. Hormuz Risk To […]
The Position That Does Not Exist Yet
Watch in 1 minute video here Managing partners at independent disputes firms are, in my experience, already past the question of whether their marketing is working. Most have concluded it is not, or is working in ways they cannot trace, and they concluded it some time ago. What they are stuck on is different and […]
A Calendar-Dated Pipeline for Cross-Border Wealth and Banking Disputes
Watch in 1 minute video here Between 8 June and 31 August 2026, Indian banks took in $127.22 billion in Foreign Currency Non-Resident (FCNR) deposits under the Reserve Bank of India’s special dollar-rupee swap facility. That is nearly four times the size of the 2013 Taper Tantrum facility, raised in twelve weeks. The response was […]
Legal Work That Is Obviously Useful and Very Hard to Sell
Watch in 1 minute video here A company misses a milestone under a government incentive programme because equipment could not be delivered. Over the following year it explains that delay four times. Once to the ministry, in support of an extension and a waiver of penalties. Once to the equipment vendor, in the course of […]
A Question You Would Ask Any Client
Watch in 1 minute here In the ordinary course of a week, a law firm managing partner will work out things about a client’s business that the client has not articulated clearly itself. Questions on the practice head’s list might sound like: Where the revenue actually comes from? Who has authority to commit money and […]
What Foreign Firms Are Actually Being Offered in India
Watch in 1 minute video here For most of the last twenty years, the question of foreign law firms in India has been discussed as though it were binary. Either the market opens or it does not. Firms have accordingly treated it as an event to wait for, and may have insufficiently prepared for it, […]
Work That Has a Date on It
Watch in 1 minute video here When Larsen & Toubro booked roughly INR 50,000 crore in West Asian hydrocarbon packages and VA Tech Wabag entered Kuwait’s desalination market, law firm marketing desks predictably issued a wave of analysis. It is entirely understandable why firms publish at the moment of award – the news is public, […]
The Person With the Problem Is Not Always the Person Who Decides
Watch in 1 minute video here When an overseas employer calls a $50 million performance guarantee on short notice, the buyer of legal services changes in a single afternoon. Business development in most law firms is built around the person who has the problem. That is a reasonable place to start, because it is usually […]
What a Ten-Year Enforcement Says About the Market for It
Watch in 1 minute video here. Scope: this is a note on how legal work in this corridor is bought, sold and presented. It is not legal analysis. It does not address the separate proceedings concerning domestic lender share pledges, and a forensic audit order is investigative and it establishes no wrongdoing on anyone’s part. […]
What Kills Law Firm Business Development Theses
Watch in 1 minute video here We spent some days working through a single development (a court order in a long-running cross-border enforcement matter) to establish whether it contained a business development opportunity for law firms. We tested five propositions. Four failed. This note sets out how they failed, because the failure modes are more […]