Matters of judgement

A profession is defined less by its rules than by what its members do when the rules run out. That thought surfaces, unbidden, in almost every piece gathered in our July 2026, and rarely in the places you'd expect to find it.

These contributions describe a profession working in the space between frameworks built for one world and the conditions its practitioners now face. The law has not failed. It is simply being asked, more and more often, to govern situations its drafters never anticipated. What carries a practitioner across that gap is not a better rulebook but something harder to codify: judgement. It is the quiet subject of this issue, and it is worth following from one section to the next.

Consider the technology pieces. Sinead Casey and Leanne Raven of Linklaters examine what legal professional privilege means once a client has uploaded counsel's advice into a consumer AI tool, drawing on United States v Heppner and the Upper Tribunal's decision in UK v Secretary of State for the Home Department. The doctrine is unchanged: privilege depends on confidentiality. Its application has rarely been harder. Sonali Fenner of Slalom names the deeper problem directly — a widening "judgement gap" that opens as firms adopt AI while letting go of the experienced people who could tell when its output is wrong. Ivy Grey of iManage supplies the constructive answer: governance that comes not from longer rulebooks but from cultivated professional judgement itself. None of these contributors is waiting for the legislature. David Green and Alice Stripe of Trowers & Hamlins show why they cannot — celebrities are already reaching for trade mark law to defend their own faces against AI deepfakes, improvising image protection from a statute that recognises no freestanding image right at all.

That instinct, to advise on the realities clients face rather than the ones the law was written for, runs through our interviews too. Chris Spelman of DWF and Sohail Ali of DLA Piper, both steeped in cross-border disputes, describe the same posture from the litigator's chair: real enthusiasm for what these tools unlock, paired with an insistence that someone experienced still has to check the work. Eduardo Ustaran of Hogan Lovells frames it as a matter of professional survival, keep learning, cultivate the human instincts no model can replicate, and be a player rather than a spectator.

The same pattern recurs well away from the technology pages. John Caddies of Hill Dickinson, writing on the hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius, reminds us that a single outbreak at sea now pulls in the Athens Convention, a tangle of competing jurisdictions, the World Health Organization's health regulations and a watching press, all at once. Melanie Carter of Stone King traces how practitioners must now apply the EHRC's draft code after For Women Scotland redefined the statutory meaning of “sex”, clarity in principle, considerable difficulty in practice. Jemma Pollock of Russell-Cooke welcomes the Ministry of Justice's cohabitation consultation, A fairer end to relationships, as the law belatedly catching up with how nearly half the country now chooses to live.

Sometimes the framework is not merely strained but quietly corrected. Claudia Hillemand of Bolt Burdon Kemp examines the Supreme Court's decision in CCC, which finally allows children with shortened life expectancy to claim for their "lost years" exactly as adults always could, an old unfairness closed by judges rather than statute. 

Susanna Heley of Russell-Cooke asks a sharper question still: whether the SRA's intervention powers, built for the paper-and-chequebook profession of the 1970s, remain the right instrument now that three-quarters of firms are incorporated. And Laura Cooper of the Youth Justice Legal Centre unpacks the sentencing of three teenage boys for rape, a decision much of the country judged long before reading the remarks, and which the Court of Appeal will review this very month. Hers is a study in the distance between law correctly applied and law as the public wants it felt.