All Law Gazette articles in Archive – Page 1295
-
News
Chancery Lane hails scrapping of best value tendering pilots
The Law Society has welcomed the Ministry of Justice’s decision to ask the Legal Services Commission not to proceed with its planned pilots for best value tendering (BVT).
-
News
Book sales, climate change funds and hotel developments
Energy boost: Allen & Overy advised a consortium of six banks on creating the Marguerite Fund, an energy, climate change and infrastructure fund for EU member states. The banks contributed €100m (£90m) each, with the fund seeking to raise €1.5bn (£1.35bn) by mid-2011.
-
News
Branching out
Christmas trees, like pretty much everything else, have always been subject to the vagaries of fashion. In the 1980s, it was all coloured lights and patterned baubles (chez Obiter, at any rate), then came the more sophisticated white lights, non-twinkling. A few years ago the fashion was for fibreoptic trees, ...
-
News
Law Society seeks judicial review over costs capping
The Law Society is set to seek a judicial review of the government’s move to drastically reduce the legal costs that defendants can reclaim if they are acquitted of a criminal offence. A regulation introduced by the Ministry of Justice at the end of October removed ...
-
News
Open and shut case
So Resolution opposes the government’s plans to extend family reporting (see [2009] Gazette, 10 December, 3). The government is quite right to be extending it; the public need to know what is being done in their name.
-
News
Law firms urged to conduct identity checks on staff
Firms are putting themselves at risk by failing to carry out basic identity checks on their staff before employing them, the chairman of the Law Society’s conveyancing and land law committee has warned. Richard Barnett said he had been made aware that many firms were not ...
-
News
Payment into court by cheque – when is payment ‘received’?
Where a party to proceedings has been ordered by the court to make a payment into court, whether for security for costs or otherwise, it is common practice for such a payment to be made from a firm’s client account by cheque.
-
News
More Christmas jokes
Following on from our request for funny legal cards, Obiter received this one from motoring law specialists My brief solicitors in Kent. Can you really be charged with being drunk in charge of a sleigh, Obiter wonders? And how many points will that be on Santa’s licence? ...
-
News
Swatton Taylor Dutton and Matthew Waite & Co
In our 3 December 2009 edition, we published a letter by Peter Hughes of Hughes & Company, Tring, regarding referral fees. Mr Hughes and the Law Society Gazette are happy to make clear that the solicitors firms Swatton Taylor Dutton and Matthew Waite & Co, of Tring, have never paid ...
-
News
Wake up and smell the coffee
I am writing in response to recent letters from solicitors who either claim or imply that because their firms don’t pay referral fees they somehow have more integrity than firms that do. Aside from failing to mention that rule 1.02 of the Code of Conduct requires us all to act ...
-
News
Contingency fees regulation will drive lawyers out of the market
Government proposals to regulate contingency fees will drive lawyers out of the market and leave 500,000 people a year without legal representation, employment lawyers have warned. Draft regulations published this month by the Ministry of Justice propose a 25% cap on the proportion of a client’s ...
-
News
To survive, conveyancing solicitors must be at the heart of homebuying
by Richard Atkins, a property partner with Taylor Walton and a member of the Law Society’s e-conveyancing taskforce The recent upturn in the residential conveyancing market has once again brought into sharp focus the weaknesses of our present system.
-
News
European Court of Human Rights in 'crisis'
Europe’s foremost human rights court is in ‘crisis’, with a backlog of more than 120,000 cases waiting up to seven years to be heard, lawyers have warned. Leading human rights barrister Lord Lester QC said last week that the influx of new states since the ...
-
News
Foreign firms cannot practise Indian law, Mumbai court says
Foreign lawyers in India cannot advise clients on any matters of Indian law, the Mumbai High Court ruled yesterday. The court confirmed that legal advice outside of litigation practice is covered by the ban on foreign lawyers set down in the 1961 Advocates Act. ...
-
News
Criminal evidence
Expert evidence – Juries – Murder – Conflicting evidence (1) Lon Trach Gian (2) Noor Azura Mohd-Yusoff v Crown Prosecution Service: CA (Crim Div) (Lord Justice Moses, Mr Justice Keith, Mr Justice Foskett): 3 December 2009 ...
-
News
Dear Santa...
The turkeys are stuffed, along with the economy. And as Santa stirs in his Lapland grotto, it behoves Obiter to enquire of some of the profession’s luminaries what they would like to see under the tree on Christmas morning. And also what their New Year’s resolutions might be, since the ...
-
News
Investigating the world of private detectives: it's not quite Magnum PI
‘The dame was dressed like a million dollars and had legs that would make permafrost steam. But Zak Flint, private eye, knew it was all smoke and mirrors. He had the scars to prove it…’
-
News
Scottish Parliament warned that ‘Tesco law’ could trigger English invasion
The Scottish Parliament was warned this week that moves to liberalise Scotland’s legal services market could spark a takeover by English invaders. Lobby group the Scottish Law Agents Society (SLAS) told members of the justice committee at Holyrood that ‘external ownership’ of law firms makes it more likely that Scottish ...
-
News
Judiciary must speak out on 'parlous state of family law'
The judiciary must ‘come off the bench’ and speak out about the ‘parlous state of family law in 2009’, lord justice Wall has said. Speaking at the Association of Lawyers for Children conference, the Court of Appeal judge said ‘the time has come when the historical ...
-
News
Flight of fantasy
Master of the rolls Lord Neuberger conjured a diverting festive image in a recent speech about the new Supreme Court. Is the House of lords ‘losing part of itself’? he pondered. ‘Is it, the Supreme Court, losing a daughter or gaining a son? Or have the law lords simply transmogrified ...