Disputes in a Fragmenting World

Four areas where we currently see the most significant disputes risk

Valuation risk is often where stress appears first.

When markets move sharply, assumptions are challenged, refinancing becomes harder, liquidity tightens and counterparties start testing the numbers. In private markets especially, opacity, concentrated assumptions and long-dated positions can turn valuation pressure into investor claims, lender challenges, disclosure scrutiny, auditor or valuer exposure, and disputes over negligence, mandate compliance or hidden liabilities.

In this section, you will find content on how valuation pressure translates into practical disputes risk — including financing stress, investor and counterparty challenges, governance and disclosure issues, and the legal consequences of valuations coming under pressure.

Current insights

Corporate accountability is widening and deepening.

Boards, senior management and control functions are under pressure from multiple directions at once: product risk, consumer and investor expectations, environmental and human rights exposure, governance and reporting obligations, and financial crime compliance. What begins as a business, governance or disclosure issue can quickly become a claim, an investigation, regulatory scrutiny or an insolvency-driven dispute.

In this section, you will find content on the points at which accountability issues tend to crystallise into litigation, investigations and enforcement risk - including governance, evidence, reasonable procedures, senior management accountability and claims against directors, auditors and parent companies.

Current insights

Technology is evolving faster than many legal, governance and risk frameworks can keep up with.

That creates disputes risk in the gaps: AI-related regulatory scrutiny and liability, cyber incidents and their downstream consequences, outages and systems failures, fast-moving digital asset regulation, and uncertainty around how responsibility should be allocated when technology-driven decisions or failures cause loss.

In this section, you will find content focused on practical preparedness — including AI-related disputes and enforcement risk, cyber response, data exposure, systems disruption and how to manage legal risk while the regulatory position is still developing.

Current insights

Cross-border activity is becoming harder - not only because of geopolitics and regulatory divergence, but because disputes themselves are increasingly multi-jurisdictional by default.

Sanctions, tariffs, supply-chain disruption, energy and infrastructure stress, enforcement complexity and investor-state dynamics are all creating new pressure points. Contracts, projects and trading relationships that once looked straightforward can quickly become harder to perform, harder to enforce and harder to unwind.

In this section, you will find content on where cross-border disputes risk is most likely to land - including sanctions and enforcement, energy and infrastructure disruption, supply-chain and contractual stress, investor-state dynamics and the operational complexity of managing disputes across multiple jurisdictions.

Current insights