In this age of ever-changing rules and regulations, business travel can be more difficult than ever. The reality is that the more preparation and planning that go into a business trip, the more likely it will be a success.

“As you get older, travel changes,” says Paul Justas Sarauskas, counsel at Mayer Brown in Chicago. “When I was younger, it was exciting. It’s become more stressful and annoying because of security and everything else. These days I try to bring back the fun and take out the stress.”

Experts agree that a merger should not be an endgame for its own sake. Instead, it should serve a broader business goal. For some firms, that might be reaching new markets or adding practice groups that clients are demanding. For other firms, that might be recruiting higher-caliber lawyers or creating efficiency.

“A law firm merger needs to further a strategic imperative that the firm arrived at in a clear-thinking way, and that imperative should not just be growth.”

“With a global merger, there are so many hurdles you have to overcome in each jurisdiction,” says Hope Krebs, who co-chairs the international practice group at Duane Morris. “If you’re going to expend those resources, you’d better make sure you know what you’re getting. With a network, you know the quality of the lawyers. In a network, although resources are consumed, it’s nothing like a merger.”

Things changed after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1981 decision in Chandler v. Florida gave approval to cameras in the courtrooms. Now all 50 states have some variation on when, where and how cameras can be used. Federal courts continue to resist the technology, thus still providing work for courtroom sketch artists.

Leslie Caldwell, then the head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, argued last November that anonymizing technologies such as Tor make it nearly impossible to know where a computer is located for the sake of a warrant application, which “makes it unclear which court—if any—an investigator is supposed to go to with a search warrant application when investigating anonymized crime.”

“We are certainly seeing an upsurge in social activism, from protesting in the streets and at airports to a huge increase in people contacting government representatives, attending town hall meetings and using social media to organize,” says Traci Yoder, director of education and research for the National Lawyers Guild in New York City. As a result, legislators in nearly 20 states have responded with a flurry of bills that increase penalties for protesters, ban the wearing of masks, charge for police protection and even immunize drivers who hit protesters with their cars.

Legal managed services providers design, build and staff process-driven systems that efficiently complete legal work. The work’s content often is sophisticated and important to the client’s long-term commercial interests. Yet the volume is too large to be performed cost-effectively by law firm associates and too narrow and repetitive to warrant hiring more in-house lawyers.

Almost half of Americans live in states that have had new and restrictive gun control laws enacted since the slaughter of elementary school children at Sandy Hook. But other states now allow guns in schools and on college campuses.

If courts agree that businesses in the “sharing economy” are technology companies rather than sellers of services—and can invoke arbitration clauses in their terms of service—users of those businesses may have no recourse against civil rights violations.