One cancelled lithium project, three ICSID proceedings, a pending consolidation request and a publicly disclosed funder. Why Sonora is an unusually clean case study.

Jupiter Lithium v. Nigeria sits in a small but fast-growing category: UNCTAD records just 51 ISDS cases on energy-transition minerals since 1987, six of them in 2024 alone.

The UK's competition authority spent fifteen months on a partnership it ultimately said wasn't a merger at all. Background The UK Competition and Markets Authority closed its merger inquiry into the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership on 5 March 2025, concluding that there was no basis to review the arrangement under the UK's merger control regime, and published a full decision on 15 April 2025. The inquiry had examined whether the terms of Microsoft's investment and commercial arra

The management-services-organisation model is how private equity gets into law firms without technically owning them. Background Rules against non-lawyer ownership of law firms remain in force across most of the United States, but private capital has found a structure that works around them without technically breaching them: the management services organisation, or MSO. Under this model, practising attorneys retain formal ownership of the law firm itself, while a private-equ

Ukraine's investment-treaty exposure didn't pause for the invasion. It got more complicated. Background Investment treaty arbitration involving Ukraine has continued throughout the full-scale war, running on two separate tracks that are easy to conflate but legally distinct. One track consists of pre-war disputes, arising from grievances that predate February 2022, working their way through ICSID and other fora on their own long-standing procedural timelines. The other, newer

Al Habtoor Group's $1.7 billion claim against Lebanon, and what it says about arbitrating a banking crisis. Background Dubai-based Al Habtoor Group, one of the United Arab Emirates' larger diversified conglomerates with interests spanning hospitality, automotive, real estate and education, has formally filed a Request for Arbitration with ICSID against the Lebanese Republic. The claim proceeds under the UAE–Lebanon bilateral investment treaty, in force since 1999, and follows