Omar Salem

We're sometimes not very brave in financial services. In a heavily regulated industry it's often easier to follow precedent rather than 'risk' doing something that no-one's ever done before. It's why my first bit of advice to someone new to financial services is to read at least a bit of the FCA Sourcebook. The sooner you realise it's guidance not rules, the more innovative you'll be! But it's also why it's exciting when the industry, regulators and government get behind a new idea. Right now that's a concept of 'targeted support', namely being able to make suggestions to groups of customers with similar characteristics without it being full regulated advice. Probably sounds mad to people working in consumer retail who've been doing it for years, but it's all new in the world of money. But it's important because a frustratingly well kept secret is that the vast majority of people in the UK can be meaningfully better off on the same income and expenditure by planning how they save and invest. Targeted support will help pull back the curtain. Wake people up to this magic. There's a difference though between pulling back the curtain, and feeling confident enough to act. Any long term behaviour change is a massive jigsaw of emotions, facts and habits. There'd be a lot fewer users of mounjaro if that wasn't the case. So my plea to the industry is to get excited and experiment, but don't expect there's a silver bullet to this conundrum. We need ways of waking people up, and ways of helping them take action. Targeted support, and affordable ways to build plans. Thanks Holly Mackay and the Boring Money team for having me along to your brilliant conference to chat about this yesterday, and to FT Adviser for writing up my thoughts on how all of this relates to help in the workplace. https://lnkd.in/eQh3zX-K

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Legal teams are losing credibility fast. And it has nothing to do with your legal expertise. A General Counsel confided in me recently: "The board trusts my legal judgement completely. They just don't trust me to run an efficient operation." We've perfected the art of legal analysis whilst completely neglecting the basics of business operations. The evidence is everywhere. Finance directors demanding justification for every legal pound spent. Chief executives bypassing legal because "it takes too long." Board papers questioning whether legal adds value or just adds delay. Here's the brutal reality - exceptional legal advice delivered through dysfunctional operations equals irrelevance. You might draft the perfect contract, but if it takes three weeks to turn around, that's what gets remembered in the boardroom. The legal functions that command real respect have cracked something the rest haven't - they run like businesses, not academic departments. They measure what matters. They eliminate waste ruthlessly. They deliver predictably and professionally. They've recognised a fundamental truth: credibility comes from operational excellence as much as legal excellence. Their stakeholders don't just trust their legal judgement - they trust their ability to deliver results efficiently and cost-effectively. The transformation isn't complicated. Start treating your legal function like the business operation it actually is. Track performance metrics that matter to the business. Optimise processes that create value. Manage resources like every pound counts. Because in today's environment, legal competence without operational competence equals professional suicide. The question isn't whether you're a good lawyer - it's whether you're running a credible business function. #legalops #generalcounsel #legalleadership

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There's a huge discrepancy in General Counsel salaries, which often frustrates people. But in reality, there's a reason for this, and I think it's because there are three levels to being a GC. Level one is to provide top quality legal advice. You tell the business what they need to know, providing legal insights. That's good stuff, and necessary for a business, but in reality a significant amount of your time is managing external counsel. Level two adds in strategic input - what's good for the business' goals, offering actionable risk insights, and bridging that gap between legal and the commercial side of the business. But level three is something else entirely, they do two key things: 1) they sense problems early and prevent them from happening. It's not about saying 'we've looked at the facts and here's our solution to this'. It's about saying 'don't worry, we already knew this might happen, we prepared our legal and business tactics to mitigate this 2 years ago, and we've already fixed it'. 2) they're psychologists. They translate complex challenges into clear, manageable information, but the key is that their communication is outstanding. They know how to manage the CEO's ego, how to work with sales to keep their energy high during a collapsing transaction, how to understand the CFO's financial motivations whilst still explaining that something isn't long-term the right move. They guide leadership and colleagues without threatening their autonomy and freedom to make commercial decisions. The CEO still feels in control, the business stays focused on profits, and legal risk is handled long before it becomes a commercial distraction. Want to keep your budgets low? That's ok, you'll get good lawyers and good strategists. But when you pay top-dollar, you get someone who can take bad news and make it a highlight of your day, meaning you continue to be able to focus on the things that matter to you.

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LexisNexis report: Over 60% of UK lawyers now ‘use GenAI’, but law firm culture slows progress Sixty-one percent of lawyers say they are now using generative AI in their work, according to a new report out today (2 September) from LexisNexis, but two-thirds say slow organisational cultures risk undermining progress. Despite headline adoption clearly escalating, it is important to note that 11% of lawyers said they are using GenAI heavily for day-to-day work and that number drops to 7% at large and medium-sized firms. There are some interesting and wide-ranging findings in here, take a look. I haven't reported on how lawyers would use the time they save from using GenAI (more work or work/life balance) because I'm not clear on whether a significant amount of time is yet being freed up. #legaltech #legalservices #generativeai https://lnkd.in/e4dR3N7C

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The UK Supreme Court judgment on the payment of commissions by finance lenders to motor dealers https://lnkd.in/exCGz7Ww is a great read:   1) important remarks on the interlinkages between common law/equity and private law/sector regulation. (1A From a comparative law perspective the judgment supports Pierre Legrand’s claims about the difficulty of convergence between common and civil law. https://lnkd.in/eeTwui_Q) 2) Somewhat surprising to me that policy considerations played a relatively limited role in the decision. 3) Could the claimants have been more successful by making a competition law claim? See Allianz Hungaria https://lnkd.in/eR4WmqHu   which suggested that agreements between insurance companies and car dealers/repairers by which the remuneration paid by the former to the latter depends on the number of insurance contracts that the dealer has sold as intermediary for that insurance company may be deemed restrictions of competition by object. A competition law framing might have allowed a deeper exploration of the commercial rationality (if any) of the deals between finance companies and dealers: might these payments have been efficient? 4) From a private enforcement lens, worth noting that the industry regulator is moving towards a compensation scheme.  https://lnkd.in/eDMVJz8u Lessons for competition damages claims perhaps? Sometimes follow-on damages claims could be processed more efficiently through such schemes - any Member State want to take the lead? 🙂      

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Introducing Mishcon de Reya's latest guide, providing a concise overview of the key competition law principles under UK law relevant to start-ups and growing companies. Download your copy for practical guidance to help new businesses operate legally and ethically while fostering innovation and growth, from Gwen Ballin-Reeler and Chanelle Cattin: https://lnkd.in/gZQay-35

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Interesting case on sanctions from the High Court on 31 July this year. It is about a party (Party A) not wanting to honour its' contractual obligations because they believed in doing so, they would be non-compliant with EU and UK sanctions as they suspected their counter party (Party B) was controlled by a sanctioned individual. This arises out of having a sanctions clause in a contract - a clause that permits non-performance (or termination) of contractual obligations if they would cause the performing party (here Party A) to be in breach of sanctions. Interestingly, in this case involving a shipowner, despite concerns that Party B was controlled by an individual subject to UK and EU sanctions, it was held by the Judge that Party A were wrong to not perform their obligations. That was because they had suspicions of control and ownership of the sanctioned individual but no direct evidence. It was speculation which was not enough to invoke the sanctions clause. Some useful lessons from the case including: 👉 For the sanctions clause to apply, Party A had to establish that it had made an objectively reasonable judgement that the listed parties were subject to the risk of sanctions or open to the danger of sanctions. 👉 The clause required the assessment of a reasonable commercial person, in good faith, as to whether there was a real risk or danger (in the context of ordinary commercial people in a fast paced quick decision environment) Case details below. Thanks as ever to the amazing David Bacon and the team Business Crime & Investigations at Practical Law for their weekly updates including this case. Tonzip Maritime Ltd v 2Rivers Pte Ltd [2025] EWHC 2036 (Comm) (If you would like a copy of the case feel free to DM me)

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