Advertise on podcast: The Agenda

Geraint Lloyd-Taylor and Brinsley Dresden are back with a packed update. The new DMCCA subscription rules have been pulled forward to January 2027, so who is caught and what should you do now? Plus, what the ASA’s first wave of less healthy food rulings (including M&M’s, On the Beach and McCain) tells advertisers, and why the EU’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition directive reaches UK brands too.

In this episode, Sally and David discuss what we’ve learnt from the Next EAT equal pay appeal decision and the preparation needed for new Employment Tribunal time limits from 1 October 2026.

Cross-border working on the island of Ireland is full of hidden pitfalls for employers. In this episode, Ciara and Síobhra explore the compliance traps that catch businesses out, from criminal liability for failing to meet NI’s fair employment monitoring obligations, to the EU Pay Transparency Directive and costly tax and payroll mistakes when staff work from home across the border. With remote and hybrid working on the rise, employers need to understand these risks now more than ever.

In this episode, George Hannah is joined at the (virtual) fireplace by Abigail Wise, Partner at Lewis Silkin, for an honest chat about what it really takes to build a career in law when you don't come from a traditional background, and don’t take a traditional route into law. Abigail shares her personal journey, from her beginnings as a secretary, to early career hurdles, and ultimately to partnership. She reflects on the key life moments that shaped her path, the barriers she encountered along the way, and what the profession still needs to change. It’s a candid conversation about resilience, grit and belonging, and why representation at the top matters.

This discussion called Check Your Privilege was recorded live at our 2026 Managing and International Workforce Conference. In this session, Carla Watling's joined by Rebecca McAlees, Senior Global Employment Counsel at Unilever, and Jill Bagler from Epstein, Becker and Green to explore legal professional privilege across borders. They unpack how privilege rules differ between the UK, the US and civil law jurisdictions, share practical tips for preserving privilege in a multi jurisdictional communication, and discuss the emerging risks that AI poses to confidentiality and privilege.

This Inside APAC session was recorded live at the 2026 Managing and International Workforce Conference. In this session, Caterine Leung, Matthew Durham, and Desmond Wee take us on a rapid-fire tour of employment law developments across the Asia-Pacific region. From AI governance and sweeping labour reforms from India, Indonesia, and Japan, to tightening discrimination laws, evolving data privacy regimes. and shifting approaches to pay and social security. This session covers the key changes employers with an APAC footprint need to know about.

This Employment Law Across the Globe session, recorded live at our 2026 Managing and International Workforce Conference. In this session, Sean Dempsey, Colin Leckey, Hannah Price, and Sophie Maes deliver their annual roundup of global employment law developments. They cover an enormous range of topics from the EU Pay Transparency Directive and diverging approaches to DEI, to workplace AI regulation. platform workers, working hours reforms, trade union rights, leave entitlements, ESG and more. If you want a snapshot of the key employment law trends shaping workplaces around the world, this is the session for you.

This is from our Should AI Stay or Should AI Go session, recorded live at our 2026 Managing and International Workforce Conference. In this session, David Regan, Joe DeFonseca from our very own privacy team, Sam Howarth from Slalom and Marco Sederi from Toffoletto in Italy dug into the legal and practical challenges of AI in the workplace.

In this episode, Geraint Lloyd-Taylor and Jen Dinmore discuss the High Court's judgment CMA’s case against Emma Sleep, in an important ruling dealing with discount claims (so called ‘reference pricing’). The case centers on the CMA's attempt to impose a strict 1:2 ratio requirement, under which a retailer could only sell two mattresses at a discounted price for every one sold at the higher "reference" price, before that higher price could no longer be used in a "was/now" pricing claim. This episode explores why the judge declined to endorse the CMA's proposed ratio, instead sending the parties away to negotiate a more nuanced approach that focuses less on a rigid, quantifiable, blanket approach.

This week on Work and Class, we're talking about accent bias - the subtle form of prejudice that shapes how people are perceived at work, often without anyone consciously admitting it.   Accent bias is everywhere. It affects recruitment, career progression, confidence, and even the roles people feel they can aspire to. Yet it rarely gets the attention it deserves.   In this episode, we are joined by Dr Kevin Latham, Research and Policy Manager at the Sutton Trust, and Holly Wilcock, an employment associate at Lewis Silkin. Tom Heys explores what the research actually tells us, including a striking statistic that 76% of interviewers admit to being swayed by a candidate's accent.   Kevin also unpacks the persistent ranking of accents by prestige and why Northern and Midlands accents consistently come out worst, while Holly shares her own experience of being told her West Country accentwould make it "really difficult to get a job" as a lawyer.   Together, they discuss why accent bias gets stronger as people age, why university is often the moment it hits hardest, and what employers can do about it - including one simple, zero-cost intervention that has been shown to make a real difference.

How did Greece implement the EU Pay Transparency Directive in just 33 days? In this episode of Pay Attention, Tom Heys and David Lorimer and joined by Katerina Papastergiou from Kremalis to explore one of the fastest transpositions of the Directive anywhere in Europe. They unpack the journey from consultation to final law, examine the key changes made along the way, and explain what employers need to know. The discussion covers employee information rights (including a trailblazing(?) right for employers to refuse requests), the role of worker representatives, enforcement and sanctions, and one of the Greek law's most distinctive features: the central role of the Greek Ombudsman, who has been placed at the heart of every PTD process.

This week, Pay Attention heads to Northern Ireland. Although the UK left the EU, Northern Ireland occupies a unique legal and constitutional position, raising an unexpectedly tricky question: does the Pay Transparency Directive apply there? Northern Ireland presents perhaps the biggest legal puzzle of the Pay Transparency Directive. Employment law is devolved. The UK has left the EU. But Article 2 means the story doesn’t end there. Joined by Leeanne Armstrong from Lewis Silkin’s Belfast office, Tom Heys and David Lorimer explore what Article 2 actually says, why lawyers disagree about what it means, how Northern Ireland’s own gender pay gap proposals fit into the picture, and, most importantly, what employers should be doing while the lawyers continue to disagree. It’s an episode about constitutional law, equality law, Brexit and pay transparency. Surprisingly, it all makes sense. Mostly.

Geraint Lloyd-Taylor and Brinsley Dresden are back with a bumper mid-year-round-up of the biggest advertising and marketing law developments of 2026 so far. Fresh from Cannes Lions, they dive into the CMA’s new guidance on agentic AI, the incoming social media ban for under-16s, ASA procedural shake-ups, cosmetics “clinically proven” claims crackdowns, and the CMA’s muscular new enforcement of pricing rules under the DMCC Act, including the Emma Sleep trial, AA driving school’s £4.2m fine, and StubHub’s penalty.

In this special episode on privilege, Carla Watling and Sohrab Daneshku explore the High Court decision in Aabar v Glencore and what it means for legal advice privilege, including when protection may extend to internal communications within a client group or documents created by a group member, even where no lawyer is involved.

In this episode of our international privacy podcast series, we welcome Vanessa Riberio, Partner at Gusmão & Labrunie, to discuss the practical implications of Brazilian data protection law for UK and EU businesses looking to expand into one of Latin America's most exciting digital markets.   We cover the LGPD and its key similarities and differences compared to the GDPR, the EU-Brazil mutual adequacy decisions, the new Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent (Digital ECA) and the red flags and practical watch-outs that could catch UK and EU businesses off guard. The discussion also explores the ANPD's enforcement posture and why businesses should not assume that existing GDPR compliance will automatically cover them in Brazil.