For corporate lawyers, the regulatory aspects of transactional work have always been something of a side issue: important, but unimpressive in bottom-line terms. As business has grown and globalised, that side issue increasingly has taken a central role.
The past five years have seen an impressive growth in the teeth of regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in respect of antitrust issues, as General Electric and Honeywell, not to mention Microsoft, have discovered. Meanwhile the nefarious accounting practices of some of the US’s biggest and most respected public companies have triggered a major change in attitude towards public regulation of private business, which has led to a marked rise in the global importance of regulatory centres to corporate institutions.
