The warning by Criminal Bar Association chair Max Hill QC today that barristers are prepared to strike - backed by a survey showing near unanimous outrage - is a watershed moment.
Hill notes barristers’ reluctance to use their ‘ultimate weapon’, namely ‘stopping the courts’, to make their point, but perhaps that is what it will take before the government will listen.
Legal services liberalisation has been a phoney war, but I think that ends with today’s news that logistics company Stobart Group is entering the market with the launch of Stobart Barristers. For sections of the bar, it makes the ProcureCo model look like Betamax to the green and yellow giant’s VHS.
As social ties are stretched to breaking point by the economic crisis, an interesting question arises: do lawyers have the right to strike, and if so in what circumstances? The focus here is not on the legal right granted to citizens, including lawyers, by the law of a particular country, but the impact of striking on lawyers’ duties under their professional code of conduct.
Increasingly, original title deeds are disappearing and we are ever more dependent on obtaining copies from the Land Registry. Yet again this morning an office copy lease has arrived with the plans uncoloured and a power of attorney which had no relevance included as a page of the lease. I can think of numerous occasions when I have received office copies that were either incomplete, or with uncoloured plans, or no plan at all. There have been other occasions when I have requested documents that appear on the title and the Land Registry has not even got a copy.
The government intends to clamp down on compensation claims arising from road traffic accidents. Apparently, the government regards solicitors as the ‘bad guys’ and insurers as the ‘good guys’.
