All Law Gazette articles in Archive – Page 1395
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News
Wigster comparison site signs up Shoosmiths’ consumer arm
The consumer services arm of national firm Shoosmiths has joined 125 firms that have signed up with legal price comparison website Wigster, which launched at the start of this month. Access Legal from Shoosmiths is the biggest firm to sign up to the comparison site ...
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News
Law Society calls for greater focus on ethics in training
The Law Society has called for law degrees to include a greater focus on ethics and for a more robust system of ensuring the quality of institutions which provide legal education and training. This follows the joint review of legal services education and training announced ...
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News
Is trial by jury under pressure from judges?
Jury trials have been in the spotlight in the last few weeks, with two significant speeches by senior judges focusing on juries. The lord chief justice called for tough sanctions against jurors who surf the web to find information about defendants and witnesses in the case they are sitting on ...
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News
Family courts have lost authority, warns judge
A High Court judge has warned that the family court needs to reassert its authority to tackle the ‘lack of respect’ shown for its orders. Speaking at the Association of Lawyers for Children annual conference at the weekend, Mr Justice Coleridge said that, in placing ...
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Legal executives seek independent conveyancing rights
Legal executives could be granted independent rights to provide conveyancing services from next September, if a forthcoming application to the Legal Services Board is successful. But conveyancing solicitors have questioned the economic logic of encouraging new entrants into an already overcrowded market, where transaction rates have ...
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News
Why workplace monitoring is critical to an inclusive legal profession
by Stephen Ward, communications director and and diversity champion at the Law Society On 25 October, the Law Society published the first annual report on the progress of its Diversity and Inclusion Charter. Some 180 firms and in-house practices are now signatories to the charter, ...
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News
Latest news from inter-governmental organisations
It is a strange paradox that as the world becomes more globalised, our attention is drawn more to the local, as if we are incapable of encompassing a span that takes in the whole world. As a result, developments which take place at inter-governmental organisations – in some strange city, ...
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News
Legal aid solicitors overpaid by £77m
Legal aid solicitors have been overpaid by almost £77m, according to a report published today by public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office. Qualifying the Legal Services Commission’s accounts for the second year running, the NAO estimated a total of £76.5m had been overpaid to legal ...
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News
Rise in number of intestacy disputes
The number of people challenging the inheritance left by their relatives or partners has risen by 38% over the past year, according to figures obtained by City firm Wedlake Bell. Data from the High Court shows that the number of cases launched by people, including children, ...
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News
Time for partners to focus on personal finances
The current climate has led many legal partners to rethink their plans for saving for the future. Now more than ever, with the Christmas break right around the corner and tax returns due in January, many partners will be reflecting on their personal financial plans and approaches to any further ...
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News
Be realistic about legal aid cuts
I do not think we can fault the reasoning behind the legal aid cuts, which largely preserve funding for the essential areas of human rights. We should be realistic and admit that some areas of law are not priorities, and one wonders why they were ever included in the scheme ...
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News
Regulator sets out guidance on pre-emptive ABS discussions
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has issued new guidance setting out what is permitted in firms’ negotiations with potential investors ahead of the licensing of alternative business structures (ABSs) in October next year. The guidance stresses that non-lawyer individuals or businesses are currently prohibited from having any ...
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News
MoJ calls for data on RTA portal abuses
Solicitors and insurers must hand over data that exposes abuses of the road traffic accident claims portal to the Ministry of Justice, a key official said last week. Kevin Westall, head of civil justice policy, procedure and customer intelligence at the MoJ, told the Motor Accident ...
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News
We must not stand by and let government devastate access to justice
On 12 November I stood in a muddy field in Runnymede and listened to the great and the good, including justice secretary Ken Clarke, hail the Magna Carta as the foundation of fundamental rights and the protector of human freedom and civil rights. Chief among those rights are equality before ...
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Feature
BOOK REVIEW Early London County Courts: a Brief Account of Their History and Buildings
Author: Anthony Bradbury For Anthony Bradbury, a district judge in Ilford County Court for a decade, Early London County Courts is a labour of love, based on research, reading and site visits brought together since the 1980s. ...
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News
Personal injury ad ban appeal
The government should not rush to amend personal injury advertising rules, the chair of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said last week. In the first parliamentary debate on Lord Young’s ‘compensation culture’ report, which took place in the House of Lords last week, Lord Smith of ...
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News
Shopping for legal advice at QualitySolicitors: a postscript
It is slightly more than two weeks since I visited QualitySolicitors Freeman Harris in the Lewisham Shopping Centre in London. As a result of this trip, the firm has taken on one of my cases: a dispute with the police over a Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority award. That is to ...
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News
EU to the rescue on legal aid?
The government could be forced into ‘a humiliating U-turn’ over plans to cut the legal aid budget, following an EU pledge to set mandatory levels of civil and criminal legal aid for member states from 2013, it was suggested last week.
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News
Injustice of legal aid cuts
I observed the following incident at a north London magistrates’ court. A defendant, who was clearly mentally ill, had been charged with an offence that was contrary to section 5 of the Public Order Act. The facts were that he had been shouting at a ...
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News
Fixed-share partner loses appeal
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has upheld an earlier ruling that a solicitor who was a fixed-share partner in a Bournemouth law firm is not entitled to seek to claim unfair dismissal from the firm, because he cannot be classed as an ‘employee’. Martin Tiffin, a former ...