Client alert27 August 2026
Indemnity costs after the August reinsurance judgment
The Commercial Court's decision this month is being read as a construction case. The more consequential part of the judgment is the costs order, which was made on the indemnity basis on the ground that the claim was pursued after the claimant's own contemporaneous documents had been disclosed.
The practical effect is to raise the cost of continuing a weak claim past disclosure. Parties defending large constructed claims should be putting the other side on notice, in correspondence that will be read on costs, at the point the documents undermine the pleaded case rather than at trial.
For claimants, the discipline runs the other way. A claim that survives disclosure unamended is now carrying a costs risk that is materially larger than it was a year ago.
Prepared by the firm's insurance and reinsurance group. This alert is general information and is not legal advice.
Client alert16 July 2026
Enforcement against state assets after the 2026 immunity decisions
Award creditors have spent a decade working around the commercial use exception to sovereign immunity. A series of decisions this year has narrowed the space further, and the practical consequence is that attachment strategy now has to be designed at the pleading stage rather than after the award.
Three points follow for creditors holding awards against states or state entities. First, the characterisation of the debtor matters more than it did: separate juridical personality is being respected in jurisdictions that previously looked through it, so the identity of the respondent named in the arbitration will constrain what can be attached years later. Second, evidence of the commercial purpose of an asset is being required at the point of attachment rather than inferred from the nature of the asset. Third, central bank assets and diplomatic accounts remain effectively unavailable, and time spent on them is time the debtor uses to move everything else.
Creditors should expect enforcement to run in three or four jurisdictions in parallel, and should assume that the first application will be contested on immunity grounds regardless of merit.
Prepared by the firm's enforcement and recovery group. This alert is general information and is not legal advice.
Client alert2 July 2026
Training data claims: where the exposure actually sits
Litigation over model training has moved past the question of whether copying occurred. The contested issues now are the scope of the licence a defendant relies on, whether the output competes with the work in the market that matters, and what the defendant knew about the provenance of its corpus.
For companies deploying models they did not train, the exposure is contractual rather than proprietary. Indemnities given by model providers are frequently capped at a fraction of the deployer's revenue from the product, are conditioned on use restrictions that engineering teams rarely read, and are void where the customer fine-tunes on its own data. We are seeing the first disputes between deployers and providers over exactly these clauses.
Boards should be asking what corpus documentation exists, whether it can be produced under a discovery order, and who bears the loss if it cannot.
Prepared by the firm's technology and intellectual property group. This alert is general information and is not legal advice.
Client alert11 June 2026
Lender-on-lender disputes: the drafting has caught up, the conduct has not
Liability management transactions have produced a body of litigation that is now mature enough to draw lessons from. Documentation has tightened in response, but the disputes have not slowed, because the pressure that produces these transactions has not eased.
The recurring issue is process rather than permission. Where a transaction is technically permitted by the credit agreement, claims are being framed instead around the implied covenant, the sequencing of consents, and the conduct of the agent. Minority lenders who organise early and preserve their communications are in a materially better position than those who wait to see the terms.
Cooperation agreements should be treated as documents that will be read aloud in court.
Prepared by the firm's restructuring litigation group. This alert is general information and is not legal advice.
Client alert19 May 2026
Sanctions and force majeure: four years of decisions, one pattern
Tribunals and courts have now considered a substantial volume of contract claims arising from sanctions imposed since 2022. A pattern is discernible: relief turns less on the breadth of the clause than on what the party actually did in the weeks after the designation.
Parties that applied for licences, documented the refusal, and offered alternative performance have generally succeeded. Parties that treated the designation as automatically dispositive have generally not, even under clauses that appeared to cover the event squarely. Payment channel arguments have fared worst, because the tribunal usually finds that some route remained open.
The practical advice is unchanged and consistently ignored: build the licensing and mitigation record contemporaneously, because it will be the evidence the case turns on.
Prepared by the firm's sanctions and trade group. This alert is general information and is not legal advice.
Client alert28 April 2026
Disclosure of funding: what the current rules actually require
Disclosure obligations relating to third party funding now vary enough between jurisdictions that a funded claimant running parallel proceedings can be compliant in one forum and in breach in another.
In broad terms, the trend is toward disclosure of the existence and identity of the funder, and away from disclosure of the funding agreement itself. Tribunals are ordering identity disclosure for conflicts purposes almost as a matter of course. Applications for security for costs against funded claimants are being granted more readily where the funder's own position is unclear.
Funded claimants should assume the existence of funding will become known and should plan the security for costs response before the first case management conference.
Prepared by the firm's international arbitration group. This alert is general information and is not legal advice.
Client alert3 March 2026
Expedited injunctive relief in cross-border technology disputes
The window for injunctive relief in a technology dispute is narrower than most claimants assume, and it closes on the claimant's own delay rather than on the merits.
Where a competing product has launched, courts in the main venues expect the application to follow within weeks. Evidence of internal knowledge of the infringement predating the application is the single most effective answer a defendant has, and it is usually found in the claimant's own documents. Coordinated applications in more than one jurisdiction can produce leverage disproportionate to the relief obtained in any one of them, provided the factual accounts filed do not diverge.
The preparatory work should be done before the decision to apply is taken, not after.
Prepared by the firm's technology and intellectual property group. This alert is general information and is not legal advice.