Take a look back at the Top 10 most-viewed blog posts and their underlying themes that made 2021 such a memorable year
The rollercoaster year of 2021 — as the global pandemic that shook the world in 2020 began to ebb, then surge, repeatedly — offered the professional services industries of legal, tax & accounting, and corporate a wild ride, as issues of returning to work, talent, supply chain, and geopolitical concerns provided many a bump along the way.
If you look at the top 10 most-read blog posts on the Thomson Reuters Institute blog — a platform that covers those professional industries as well as courts, academia, risk & security, and talent — you can see several themes emerge that strongly attracted readers in 2021 and may offer a clue to the hot topics of 2022.
Cryptocurrency
The ups and downs of the crypto market were seemingly on everyone’s minds in 2021. The top two most-read blog posts of the year involved crypto issues, including a thought piece by Paul Marrinan, Head of Investigations at Inca Digital, about the fork in the road faced by cryptocurrency and whether it will pursue a fraudulent path populated by scammers or whether it will become a pillar of decentralized finance.
Also, a special report on the growth of cryptocurrencies around the world and how different jurisdictions are seeking to regulate them, which featured a global map identifying the regulatory “hot spots” in the crypto-realm, was also very popular with readers. Compiled by Thomson Reuters’ Senior Regulatory Intelligence Experts Susannah Hammond and Todd Ehret, the report is due to be updated in the months ahead as cryptocurrencies continue to be a most talked about topic.
Supply chain
Keith Haurie, Vice President of Business Development for ONESOURCE Global Trade Management in the Tax & Accounting unit of Thomson Reuters, wrote a timely piece that described how data analytics is transforming supply chain management, an issue that is only gaining more steam as supply chain disruptions continue to plague companies, consumers, and governments around the world. Indeed, if data analytics or any other solution can help ease this problem, as Haurie suggests, it would be most welcome.
Similarly, an informative piece by Paul Horowitz, Senior Legal Editor at Thomson Reuters Practical Law, that outlined how the 2022 tariff schedule will reflect new product streams and global environmental & social issues provided an in-depth look at how trade and taxation will be adapting to the new realities of 2022 as environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues continue to command a great importance and a greater share of our readers’ attention.
Future tech
Thomson Reuters’ resident Technologist & Futurist, Joseph Raczynski, wrote a couple of far-looking pieces that resounded with readers. First, his piece on Decentralized Finance asked how close we were to a truly bankless society; and another offering, describing the concept of the Metaverse and how it may impact the legal industry were both big reader favorites.
Market insight reports
As always, the proprietary reports complied by the Thomson Reuters Institute from data drawn from its resources like Peer Monitor or Sharplegal, were extremely popular, including its annual Report on the State of the Legal Market and the Legal Department Operations Index. However, one stand-out among these reports — at least in readers’ eyes — was the mid-year Stand-Out Lawyers survey, which detailed how top lawyers still harbor some deep concerns about their role in the post-pandemic legal environment.
ESG
As mentioned earlier, key issues of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) concern are strongly resonating with corporations, and with their legal teams, tax teams, and outside law firms, as well as with other organizations. Nadya Britton, manager for Tax & Accounting content at Thomson Reuters Institute, penned a piece earlier in the year that pointed out exactly why ESG issues should be of great interest to corporate tax departments and what corporate tax team leaders need to understand to better handle these issues.
On the law firm side of things, Natalie Runyon, Director of Talent, Culture & Inclusion Content, wrote that ESG and the increase in legal clients’ need for transparency around these issues has pushed law firms to create new sustainability practice areas, which are likely to be source of continued investment in 2022 and beyond.
Legal marijuana
Finally, rounding out our Top 10, was Gina Jurva’s look at what increasing marijuana legalization means for those financial institutions that seek to serve marijuana distributors, growers, and retailers. As Jurva, manager for Corporate & Government content at Thomson Reuters Institute, points out, as more states legalize marijuana use, many state-based banks could see a boom in marijuana-related businesses seeking their services.
We appreciate all our readers devotion over the past year, as turbulent as it often seemed, and we look forward to serving up content that enlightens, informs, and challenges in 2022.
