I recently came to the end of a multi-day employment law case. My opponent was everything one might have traditionally expected a barrister to be: white, male, apparently public school educated and wearing a pinky ring to assure us he was of the right pedigree. From the moment I introduced myself with a smile on the first morning of the case (as I always do), he immediately assumed an over-familiarity with me, accompanied by a mean-spirited jocularity which I doubted he would have assumed had I been a fellow male barrister. On the second day of the case, after I had finished cross-examining his client, he approached me as the parties were leaving the tribunal room. He began an apparently casual conversation with the innocuous comment “It got awfully warm in there this afternoon”, to which I started to respond with an equally innocuous observation about the air-conditioning being switched off. Before I could finish my sentence, he retorted with “It must have been all your hot air”.

“Just so I’m crystal clear on this,” said Santa, with just a hint of frustration in his voice, “you’re telling me that, from May next year, I can’t use my database of good and naughty boys and girls unless I spend Mrs Claus’s Christmas money on GDPR consultants?” The board meeting of Claus Logistics at the North Pole was not going well and Muggins, the legal & compliance elf, was shifting uneasily in his little pine seat. “With respect, Mr Claus, I’m not sure you’re allowed to refer to them as boys and girls any longer because I heard a bloke on Polar FM and he was saying…” “Enough!” said Santa with a look that could melt the frost on a reindeer’s muzzle. “At the risk of misquoting Monty Python, I don’t care a tinker’s cuss for all this red tape.”

The internet has been awash recently with initial coin offers (ICOs). Although crypto-currency has been around for a few years, only recently have hip-hop stars got in on the action. ICOs are an initial public offering (IPO) of crypto-currency, but to understand that (or even to understand why you should care about ICOs), you have to understand what crypto-currency is, and the blockchain technology on which it relies.

Written in honour of Malcolm Young, recently deceased founding member of AC/DC, there are nine references to AC/DC songs throughout this article. We will send a £20 iTunes voucher to the first person who gets in touch to tell us what they are. The forces that are driving change in the legal profession are wide and varied. The ability of law firms and individual solicitors to respond positively and innovatively to these challenges will determine who survives and prospers. Competition for new business is fierce, a dog eat dog world, one might say. Which brings us to AC/CD. Not my favourite rock band, but an acronym for Attract, Convert, Close and Delight – the four pillars of inbound marketing.

In 1950, Alan Turing asked himself, “Can machines think”? Almost 70 years later, the Turing Test remains unbeaten. But a computer that can imitate human intelligence seems just a matter of time. Today, however, AI is still in its infancy. This is especially the case in the legal world, not particularly known for its urge for technological innovation. And as is the case with new technologies, a healthy dose of scepticism is required to distinguish between hype and opportunity. The most sophisticated AI systems still produce non-intelligent false-positives and cannot understand contextual information.