Practitioners and stakeholders in the arbitration community have welcomed the long-awaited Arbitration Act 2025, which has now received Royal Assent, marking the most significant update to English arbitration law in nearly three decades. This milestone concludes a years-long process initiated by the Law Commission’s 2023 recommendations and underscores the UK government’s commitment to maintaining London as an arbitration hub.

The devastating January 2025 wildfires in southern California prompted Governor Newsom to declare a state of emergency on January 7, 2025 for Los Angeles and Ventura counties. This triggered California laws around price gouging and pricing restrictions in the wake of the emergency. While other, overlapping states of emergency will impact how price restrictions are ultimately calculated and considered – including local emergencies, and a statewide emergency relating to the ongoing bird flu outbreak – that the unprecedented scale of the wildfires will undoubtedly lead to increased scrutiny of pricing practices during the immediate aftermath, recovery and rebuilding.

Stablecoins have emerged as one of the most transformative innovations in the cryptocurrency space, bridging the gap between the volatility of traditional cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and the stability demanded by mainstream financial systems. This rise has brought with it a wave of innovation, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the growing number of patent applications for stablecoin technologies.

Less than two months after CVC made the surprising move to revoke two of its seminal European CRISPR patents, Sigma-Aldrich has done it too. While the facts that led to Sigma’s “self” revocation may be different than CVC’s, this en vogue trend of avoiding final decisions is troubling because it denies the public of the certainty it deserves. 

On November 6, 2024, the French Supreme Court rejected the enforcement of an interim award on jurisdiction in the legal saga opposing Malaysia to the heirs of the Sultan of Sulu and spanning several jurisdictions. The Supreme Court ruled that the arbitration clause in an 1878 agreement – and on the basis of which a US$15 billion award has since been issued against Malaysia – is null and void. This decision will presumably lead the French Supreme Court to annul the US$15 billion award itself next.

There is no shortage of surprises and twists in the decade-long fight over the control of dominant IP in the CRISPR space.  The newest one is the self-revocation of two seminal CRISPR patents in Europe by the team led by two Nobel Laureates Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna (aka “CVC”).  …

The Department of Justice and eight state attorneys general filed a civil antitrust lawsuit in August against RealPage Inc. – a Texas-based software company that provides property management software – and several landlords using its software. This case adds to the growing number of antitrust cases targeting algorithmic pricing tools, and is another example of federal regulators taking a tough stance on new AI technologies.