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

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

Panama's annulment of the CK Hutchison port concessions triggered a USD 2 billion ICC arbitration, and effects far beyond it. A case for measuring dispute spillovers.

Saudi Arabia scrapped its Qualified Foreign Investor status. It kept the 49 percent cap. Background On 1 February 2026, Saudi Arabia's Capital Market Authority implemented amendments to the Rules for Foreign Investment in Securities, opening the Kingdom's capital market to all categories of foreign investors for direct investment on the Tadawul, the Saudi stock exchange. The reform eliminates the Qualified Foreign Investor status that had gated direct market access since 2015

Greenland gets its own FDI screening law just as the EU moves to tighten its own — over the same critical minerals. Background Greenland's own investment-screening regime, announced as part of its Foreign, Security, and Defense Strategy for 2024–2033, entered into force on 1 January 2026, covering eight sensitive industries including raw materials. Almost simultaneously, the European Union has been working through a review of its own FDI screening regulation that is expected

What the major law firms' 2026 arbitration forecasts agree on, and why the agreement itself is the interesting part. Background Every January, a cluster of major international law firms publish forward-looking notes on arbitration trends for the year ahead. Read individually, each is a piece of client-facing commentary. Read together, the 2026 crop — from Freshfields, Cleary Gottlieb, Baker McKenzie, Charles River Associates, A&O Shearman and Crowell & Moring, among others —

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

Most investor-state research studies treaties. UNCTAD's newest report studies statutes instead — and finds the same risks hiding in plainer sight. Background UNCTAD published Investment Policy Monitor, Issue No. 32, on 4 December 2025, under the title Investor–State Arbitration under Investment Laws: Risks and Policy Lessons. It builds on the earlier Investment Policy Monitor No. 29, which had tracked global trends in the drafting of national investment laws, and turns instea

Singapore's commercial court turns ten, and starts doing work that looks a lot like arbitration's job. Background The Singapore International Commercial Court held a conference marking its tenth anniversary in January 2025, drawing more than 420 delegates from fifteen jurisdictions. A decade in, the court's docket has moved well beyond the general cross-border commercial disputes it was originally designed to hear, into territory that overlaps increasingly with the traditiona

UNCTAD's World Investment Report 2025 shows FDI falling for a second straight year, down sharply in Europe and up in North America. What the split means.

Romania is leaving the Energy Charter Treaty — but Article 47's twenty-year sunset clause means the treaty's investment protections outlive the withdrawal itself. A look at why exiting an energy treaty is not the same as being free of it.

UNCITRAL WGIII produces a complete, dated, public drafting record going back a decade. Read as a corpus rather than as doctrine, it becomes measurable.

A stayed award, a transparency report and a caseload statistic. Each shows a gap between what investment arbitration is designed to do and what it observably does.

A PCA tribunal declined jurisdiction over Zeph Investments' USD 305 billion claim against Australia. What the award tells us about who qualifies as a foreign investor.

There is no US-Russia BIT in force and Russia never ratified the ICSID Convention. Exxon's Sakhalin-1 claim shows what is left when the treaty layer is simply absent.

Orsted is majority State-owned and lost a nearly complete wind project to a regulatory order. Whether such an investor can even reach ICSID is an unsettled question.

Shell has signalled a treaty claim against Bolivia over an annulled award and criminal proceedings. Why the forum question comes first, and why Bolivia is a hard respondent.