TOGETHER WITH

Table of contents

• EDITOR’S RAMBLE 🗣

• FEATURED REPORT 📰

• TOGETHER WITH BARBRI SQE* 🤝

• IN OTHER NEWS 🗞

• AROUND THE WEB 🌐

• STUFF THAT MIGHT HELP YOU 👌

EDITOR’S RAMBLE 🗣

This week, I learned about 3 ways companies are responding to Trump’s tariffs.

I thought it was worth sharing, because if this topic comes up in interviews, you can raise these points to show off your commercial awareness.

👟 Strategy 1: Tariff engineering

This is where companies slightly tweak their products to fit into a cheaper tax category. Converse, for example, adds felt to the sole of its trainers. This lets them call them “house slippers”, which face lower tariffs than trainers.

It sounds strange, but it’s legal — and other brands do it too.

🚪 Strategy 2: Using “bonded warehouses”

These are storage sites where companies can keep goods without paying tariffs straight away.

They only pay when they take the goods out to sell — giving them time to wait and see if tariffs drop.

🚫 Strategy 3: Cancelling orders entirely (to avoid paying higher tariffs)

Some companies are cancelling shipments completely.

US imports dropped 43% in just two weeks in April — a drop as big as during the Covid lockdowns.

This can cause empty shelves and supply problems, but for some, it’s better than paying higher costs.

- Idin

P.S. Want to share something with 20,000 LittleLaw readers? I’m auctioning next week’s ad slot from just £0.01.

FEATURED REPORT 📰

🍽️ Why DoorDash wants Deliveroo (+ SevenRooms)

What’s going on here?

DoorDash, a food delivery company based in San Francisco, has agreed to buy two businesses this week.

• The first is Deliveroo, a UK food delivery company. DoorDash will pay £2.9 billion to buy it.

• The second is SevenRooms, a platform that helps people book restaurant tables. That deal is worth £960 million.

DoorDash is using a combination of its own cash and a £2.14 billion loan from JP Morgan to fund these deals.

Why is DoorDash buying Deliveroo and SevenRooms?

DoorDash made a record $193 million profit in early 2025 — only the third time it’s ever turned a profit. This came from:

• Growth in grocery orders

• More DashPass subscribers

• Customers ordering more often

With extra cash to spend, DoorDash is expanding in two ways:

1. New markets: Buying Deliveroo gives DoorDash a big foothold in 12 European countries, including the UK, where Deliveroo holds 25% of the market.

2. New services: Buying SevenRooms lets DoorDash move into restaurant bookings, aiming to become a full platform for both food delivery and reservations. As we wrote in our article on Revolut, the companies that dominate a market often build an ecosystem — a place where customers can do lots of things, not just one. This is what DoorDash is now trying to build.

What approvals are needed before the deals can happen?

Both deals need standard legal and regulatory approvals (like competition checks, foreign investment reviews, and court or regulator sign-off to confirm the process followed the law).

But the Deliveroo deal also needs two extra approvals.

1. Shareholder approval (called a scheme of arrangement): Because Deliveroo is listed on the London Stock Exchange, its shareholders must approve the sale.

At least 75% of shareholders who vote at a special meeting on 20 May must agree. If they do, the courts will check that the process followed the law. Once approved, the deal is final — even if some shareholders voted against it or didn’t vote.

2. EU foreign subsidies approval: The EU’s foreign subsidies rule says that if the buyer received more than €50 million in funding from non-EU countries in the last three years, the European Commission (the EU’s competition regulator) must review the deal before it goes ahead.

This rule exists to stop non-EU governments from giving money to companies in a way that could give them an unfair advantage over European businesses.

This deal is caught by the rule because DoorDash has received major backing from the Singapore government, which owns a large stake in the company worth over $4.8 billion.

What happened to DoorDash’s share price after the news?

After announcing the two deals, DoorDash’s share price fell by over 9%.

There are two main reasons:

1. Investors think DoorDash is overpaying for Deliveroo: DoorDash offered 180 pence per share. That’s 44% more than Deliveroo’s share price before the deal was announced.

2. Investors worry about the SevenRooms deal: DoorDash has never bought a software company before. Some investors aren’t sure it has the experience to make the most of SevenRooms’ technology.

Which law firms are involved?

Is this part of a bigger trend?

Yes — the food delivery market is going through a wave of deals as companies fight for more customers and bigger markets.

DoorDash’s move comes after six busy months in the sector, including:

• Uber agreeing to buy 85% of Turkish delivery app Trendyol GO for £760 million.

• Instacart launching Fizz, a new app for Gen-Z, focused on group orders of drinks and snacks.

• Wonder, a ghost kitchen operator, buying Grubhub (the US arm of Just Eat).

• Grab (a food delivery company) in talks to buy its Indonesian rival GoTo, which would make it the market leader in Indonesia.

Big players are trying to grow fast — either by buying rivals or by launching new services.

How can you use this in your applications?

Lots of applicants might mention the trend of companies leaving the London Stock Exchange (we’ve written about this before). But this story lets you go further by looking at why tech companies, in particular, seem to struggle in London.

For example, big tech names like IBM and Just Eat have already left London to list elsewhere. Deliveroo’s journey shows why. Its share price dropped 26% on its first day of trading in 2021 and has struggled since.

Investors didn’t like two things:

1. The founder kept most of the control.

2. The company warned it might not make a profit for years.

But these things are normal for tech businesses. In places like New York, investors expect tech founders to keep control. They also accept that building market share can be a better long-term strategy than building profit.

One expert said it best — UK investors didn’t just undervalue Deliveroo, they didn’t understand it.

So in your interviews, you could say that fixing the UK’s listing rules is only part of the solution.

If the UK wants to keep or attract tech companies, it also needs to change how investors think about tech business models.

TOGETHER WITH BARBRI SQE* 🤝

Do you feel confident when applying to law firms?

Most students don’t. But you can learn to be.

The Future Lawyers Convention from BARBRI is back this June — and it’s about building your confidence before starting your career in law.

You’ll learn how to:

• 🧭 Choose the right legal path and employer for you

• ✍️ Write better applications (the kind firms actually notice)

• 🎤 Build your interview skills with real, practical tips

Both law and non-law students are welcome!

And the best bit? It’s completely free.

👉 Grab your ticket while you still can.

• 4 June — London (SOLD OUT) (join the waiting list)

• 11 June — Manchester 

• 18 June — Birmingham

• 25 June — Bristol 

P.S. If you’re at London or Bristol, LittleLaw’s running a session — so be sure to say hi!

* This is sponsored content

IN OTHER NEWS 🗞

• 🤖 The world’s first AI law firm has just been approved in the UK. Garfield Law, started by a City lawyer and a quantum physicist, uses AI to help with small debt claims. It offers services like £2 chaser letters and can run a full small claim from start to finish (except for any court hearing). Its tools are designed for clients like small businesses chasing unpaid debts. But law firms can use them too to help their teams save time by cutting out boring admin on low-value cases.

• ⚠️ A High Court judge has warned lawyers about using fake case citations. In a recent case, a barrister and her solicitors were reported to regulators after they included five made-up cases in court papers. They tried to brush it off by calling them “cosmetic errors”. But the judge called it serious misconduct. The barrister blamed AI for the error, saying it likely hallucinated the fake cases while drafting the submissions.

• 🌍 Fieldfisher is growing in Europe with two new offices in Poland. The firm has set up in Warsaw and Krakow with a team of 32 people, including 5 partners. They will offer services like M&A, tax, disputes, and more. Other UK firms like Addleshaw Goddard and Clyde & Co have made similar moves. Poland’s growing economy and its position as a gateway to central and eastern Europe are big draws — especially now that UK firms can no longer work in Russia.

AROUND THE WEB 🌐

• 📊 Grounded: LSCA, a student-led group pushing the legal industry to face its climate impact, has ranked top firms by how much fossil fuel work they do — and highlighted the few making progress

• 🌍 Move: A tool that helps you pick where to live in Europe based on prices, weather, jobs and more

• 🐉 Silly: A lawyer got told off for watermarking court papers with a purple dragon — 😆 here’s what it looked like 👇️

  

STUFF THAT MIGHT HELP YOU 👌

• 📹️ Free application help: If you're applying to commercial law firms, check out my YouTube channel for actionable tips and an insight into the lifestyle of a commercial lawyer in London.