Welcome, readers, to 2016. We hope you had a nice holiday season. Do you feel rested? Good. You're going to need all that stored-up energy you can muster for the upcoming year.

First, inside counsel will have the usual menu of issues: cost containment, managing outside counsel, labor and employment matters, regulatory changes (thank you, Paris delegates, for adding a note of uncertainty. But life would be dull otherwise, wouldn't it?).

Then there are other more pressing issues, the salesman's “incentive” in Nairobi, the engineers who find a way to cheat on emissions tests, that sort of thing.