GDL Extra Notes

Real Estate Talk – David Sanders

 Deal-driven area, and very technical.

 Walsh v Lonsdale was used for many years to avoid stamp duty.
 Big numbers in real estate: walkie-talkie was sold for over a billion last year.
 Weighting of investment managers (e.g. have to have 25% property in a portfolio)
drive the property market.
 Big spin-offs in litigation, finance, corporate, investment funds, tax, private client. All
can involve real estate.
Radical Arbitration – Melanie Willems, head of Int Arbitration from Haynes and Boone

 About settling disputes.

 Lord Mansfield was a big supporter of arbitration. He decided that merchants should
resolve their own disputes, have better knowledge of the industry.
 Arbitration Act 1996 gave it a statutory footing.
 Arbitrators only have jurisdiction if the parties confer it on them.
 Not completely separate from the courts, courts provide coercive sanctions and the
enforcement machinery to ensure that arbitration awards are paid.
 Courts will not overturn an arbitration award just because the award is ‘wrong’, but
might step in when natural justice hasn’t been done, e.g. important evidence was
not considered.
 Divorce/custody, crime, corporate governance, consumer protection are all things
that cannot be arbitrated – an overriding public interest to resolve these matters
through the national courts.
 Arbitration has rules, but they are often changed, and can be overruling in
arbitration judgements.
 ‘New York Convention’ has 161 signatories. Arbitration awards made in one NYC
state must be enforced in any other NYC state (with some exceptions, e.g. if the
decision fell outside the scope agreed, or for public policy reasons). Note that there
is no similar treaty for court judgements.
 ICSID and BITS, Bilateral Investment Treaties. Controv because big companies are
suing small governments for anything, so some countries have pulled out.
 To be an arbitrator, you need to learn about specific industry areas.
Pensions – Michael Jones from CRS

 A pension is a savings vehicle with tax advantages.

 Categorised by structure and benefit:
o Structure can be trust based, contract based, public sector i.e. by regulations.
o Benefit can be defined benefit (DB) or contribution.
 With DB schemes, risk is on employers.
 With DC schemes, the risk is borne by the members.
  £1m is the lifetime pension allowance for tax purposes.
 Now there is auto-enrollment.
 Need a working knowledge of many kinds of law: trust, contract, tax, charities,
employment, insolvency etc.
 If working for a firm changing pensions from DB to DC, a large role of the lawyer is
examining communications between firm and members of pensions scheme, helping
company design business case for changes.
Competition Law – Paul Stone CRS
IP Talk
For a long time, idea that only uploader on youtube of someone else’s content is liable for
infringement of copyright.
EU law has now made youtube more akin to broadcasters, under A17 of a directive. Youtube
needs to obtain licence from copyright-holder to have it on there.
Making it in the City