Articles by author
AI lemons and the economics of unverifiable quality: Part 1 – old kinds of firms
The mainstream adoption of generative AI systems has raised the stakes around the issue of unverifiable quality. For lawyers and most clients the hard part with AI is verification, not performance. Generative AI is world changing but it is not currently possible to reliably predict when its mistakes will be trivial or obvious and when its mistakes will be catastrophic or not apparent. For investors the related problem is that verification of quality (in other words, what is investible) requires a mix of expertise and experience that is rare.
22 MAY 2026When code meets compliance: the institutional turn in Decentralised Finance
In this article, the authors consider whether DeFi can maintain its open, disintermediated ethos while integrating with compliance frameworks.
8 FEB 2026Some updates on TMT finance
This article updates the series of articles published between March 2015 and November 2018 on the subject of financing businesses in the TMT sectors (Series 1). Since then, the type and value of intangible assets have increased, many banks have launched growth debt products, private credit firms have expanded their business both generally and in providing credit to technology businesses, and some legal developments relevant to intangible assets and credit finance have taken place.
Certainly, the value of the market has grown. According to the latest ONS figures (published in November 2024), in 2022 UK businesses invested £200bn (a record) into intangible assets. This statistic also illustrates one of the original points of Series 1: of the £200bn, only around half was invested in assets protected by intellectual property rights (IPR); the rest paid for assets such as know-how, trade secrets, business processes, and all the other intangible assets that are not covered by IPR.
We can view the lay of the land in 2025 by considering what has not changed, what has changed, and what is changing.
Agency and AI: types of agents and what they do
AI agents are becoming common in technology firms and will soon be widely used in all firms. They are not necessarily agents in the sense that lawyers think of them.
6 MAR 2025Embedded law
This In Practice article is a thought experiment on the future of legal services. Technology is changing and changing us. It will have implications for the work of lawyers. Our natural assumption is that if change is incremental, it is not radical.
22 NOV 2024Retrieval augmented generation in LLMs: AI for lawyers
In this In Practice article, we consider how understanding technical advances in AI systems helps lawyers engage with them and understand how their roles will be changed by them.
31 JUL 2024In search of lost time: Part 1: the automation and data thesis
In this In Practice article Charles Kerrigan considers automation and standardisation in commercial lending transactions. Part 2 of this article considers the effect on these topics of the fintech industry’s development.
1 SEP 2021Crypto comes of age? (also, DeFi, NFTs, Web3 and the metaverse)
Crypto is now mainstream. Charles Kerrigan highlights the impact of this across financial markets and concludes that finance lawyers can be late to a party.
1 JUN 2021Towards algorithm auditing in financial services
We are witnessing a rapid development and adoption of algorithms. At the same time, we need to develop the monitoring and managing of their safety. In the algorithmic age companies are (and should be) increasingly concerned about potential harm that their systems can cause, both in terms of reputation and financially. Knight Capital’s experience (~$450m) caused by a glitch in its algorithmic trading system is a paradigmatic example. As such, in addition to societal, legislative and regulatory pressures, companies themselves are keen to assure their systems are trustworthy.1
1 MAR 2021In search of lost time, Part 2: the effect of the fintech industry’s development on automation and standardisation
In this In Practice article Charles Kerrigan considers the effect of the fintech industry’s development on the topics of automation and standardisation in commercial lending transactions.
1 NOV 2021
