Cybersecurity, agility and digitisation of the courts will be the top IT concerns for law firms in 2016, according to a number of our law firm clients. We’ve seen cybercrime impact organisations as never before, so it’s critical that firms have plans in place to protect data, systems and client information. Who would have thought that a 15-year old could hack into a telecommunications company or that we would hear about less-than-sophisticated scams targeting firm and client bank accounts via emailed links?

It has become a commonplace – I have bowed to convention and endorsed the notion myself – to observe that law firms are labour-, not capital-, intensive, and that (here’s the dangerous and subtle segue) therefore there would be no benefit to them in taking on outside investors, much less going public. This is often combined, at least by the more nuanced, with a brief observation on the perils of law firms’ taking on a material amount, or any amount, of debt. But what if the conventional wisdom is mistaken?

I recently read a very interesting article comparing how aviation and healthcare respond to and learn from mistakes. This is very relevant to the NHS, and might lead them to understand how they should investigate mistakes in the future.

With all that’s been going on in the legal sector this year, it would be easy to conclude that our profession is doomed and that the value of what we’ve spent our working lives creating is evaporating faster than mulled wine at a Christmas market. And that in true festive tradition, we are witnessing the killing of the goose that laid one of the golden eggs of British economy – a legal system much envied and much copied throughout the world.

Is Lord Chancellor Michael Gove out of favour? Two of the most significant announcements within his portfolio – the decision on small claims and whiplash, and a review of regulation of legal services – have been hijacked by George Osborne and, in the case of regulation, Sajid Javid, as part of the Autumn Statement, only a few months after Mr Gove had told the justice select committee that he himself was considering such a review.