steelTalks is a monthly series on topics of interest to the global steel community. The lectures are presented in a webinar format with a guest lecturer. In this talk, the importance of implementing new fracture mechanics-based criteria to understand the cracking behaviour and in-service performance of high strength sheet materials will be shown. This behaviour can be addressed by understanding their fracture toughness properties. Accordingly, fracture toughness can be used to address many issues related to the cold formability of high strength steels and predict their fracture behaviour in different forming operations such as stamping, punching, hemming, deep drawing or high demanding bending.