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

Publishers move to join a proposed class action against Google over AI training — and why that procedural step matters more than it sounds. Background On 15 January 2026, publishers Hachette Book Group and Cengage Learning filed a motion to intervene in an existing, author-led proposed class action against Google in the Northern District of California, arising out of allegations that Google misused copyrighted books to train its Gemini AI models. The publishers' filing specif