All Law Gazette articles in Archive – Page 1617
-
News
My hope for Chris Grayling
Maybe the new justice secretary is about to have an expensive re-education. I admit that on his record he is not an obvious ‘rule of law’ groupie. On past form, he thinks it’s fine to shoot robbers in the back when they are running away. He was famously a bit ...
-
News
Find your own referral-fee workarounds, SRA tells firms
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has warned that it will not provide law firms with ‘safe harbour’ guidance to deal with the forthcoming referral fee ban. In a discussion paper released yesterday, the regulator says solicitors and firms should be able to work out from the legislation ...
-
News
Increase in damages by 10%
In Simmons v Castle [2012] EWCA Civ 1039, the Court of Appeal has added to the general splashing about which precedes the enactment of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. In an effort to provide ‘proper, prospective warning’, it has jumped in ahead of the implementation ...
-
News
Summertime blues as 250 law firms shut
More than 250 law firms have ceased conducting business since the start of summer, but observers are divided on whether the trend is the first sign of long-awaited consolidation or a statistical blip. Data published this week by the Solicitors Regulation Authority show a total ...
-
News
ABS newcomer eyes conveyancing panels
A conveyancing sole practitioner has become an alternative business structure – in a bid to get on to lenders’ conveyancing panels. Nicola Phillips, who has run her own firm in Horsham since 2008, told the Gazette that her status as a sole practitioner has excluded her from panels including those ...
-
News
Accutrainee welcomes first recruit
A groundbreaking scheme that finds trainees and seconds them to law firms on a temporary basis has welcomed its first recruit. Flora Hussey has become the first trainee to sign up to Accutrainee since it was launched last September. Trainees are taken on by Accutrainee but ...
-
News
Achieve by sharing problems with other jurisdictions
As is usual for new Law Society presidents at this time of year, I was thrown into the mix of 8,000 lawyers at the American Bar Association’s annual conference, the largest global gathering of lawyers after the International Bar Association’s annual conference. I arrived on American soil with a carefully ...
-
News
Discriminatory acts have a moral significance
by Dr Ronan McCrea, a barrister and lecturer in the Faculty of Laws at University College London Joshua Rozenberg’s piece on the issue of conscience exemptions from anti-discrimination legislation argues that no legitimate aim has been identified for requiring individuals to provide a service in violation ...
-
News
Admiral reveals referral fee income
Insurance giant Admiral has revealed that it rakes in £7 in personal injury referral fees for every vehicle it covers. The figure appears in the company’s half-year financial report, which lists modest increases in ‘other revenue’, including income from referral fees. Admiral insures 3.5m cars in ...
-
News
Calm in a crisis: lawyers and the internet age
There are events in the life-cycle of any business that have the potential to snowball into a crisis of unforeseen proportions. It could be a bad set of financial results or a scuppered merger. Or perhaps employee lay-offs, a high-profile desertion to a rival or allegations of misconduct by senior ...
-
News
Clarke’s trademark insouciance made him ideal for the job of dismantling legal aid
Kenneth Clarke’s singular deportment and affable manner have served to obscure the skeletons in a voluminous ministerial cupboard. Though widely considered a success as John Major’s chancellor, two decades ago he was an architect of the ruinous Private Finance Initiative. Clarke also began the process ...
-
News
Could wishes of legal aid campaigners be Granted?
She is a mixed-race woman who grew up on a council estate and was educated away from Oxbridge. Cynics will suggest it was inevitable that Maidstone MP Helen Grant would be parachuted into a ministerial role, despite entering parliament only in 2010. But is there more ...
-
News
Oligarch case whets appetite for more
A leading City lawyer says he would welcome more foreign litigation coming to London after the conclusion of a high-profile case involving two Russian oligarchs. The High Court last week found that exiled Russian Boris Berezovsky (pictured) had no claim to the business interests of Roman ...
-
News
Grey area
Talk about one-track minds. Of the 178 entries to our competition to name next summer’s legal bestseller, no fewer than 41 were variations on Fifty Shades of Grey. ‘Sorry, you will get that a lot,’ Sarah Taylor observed correctly on her submission Fifty Shades of Gray’s Inn. Bob Sage suggested ...
-
News
Automatic fines ‘top of shopping list’ for SRA
The Solicitors Regulation Authority will call on the government for permission to impose on-the-spot fines for firms that fail to comply with regulatory deadlines. Hundreds of firms are thought to have failed to submit nominations for compliance officers more than a month after a deadline ...
-
News
BSB chastised over ‘bad’ misconduct findings
The first barrister to set up a legal disciplinary practice has overturned her convictions for breaching Bar Standards Board codes on conducting litigation in a public access case. Portia O’Connor (pictured) set up Pegasus Legal Research in 2010. In May 2011 she was convicted by ...
-
News
Consumers may sue traders before national courts
European Union (EU) consumers may bring proceedings before the courts in their own member state against traders in other member states even if they had visited the trader to conclude the contract, the EU’s top court has ruled. The ruling takes into account a 2002 amendment ...
-
News
Time to buck trend
Why, since the Law Society’s regulatory function passed to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, should we as a profession (in common with our brethren at the bar) be overseen by so many authoritarian organisations which we are compelled to fund? Surely both the ombudsman and the ...
-
News
Call for ‘sanity’ on whiplash as claim numbers fall
Lawyers have called for a rethink on whiplash injury compensation after the government’s own figures showed that the number of claims fell by almost 24,000 last year. Records uncovered by the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) showed 547,405 claims for whiplash in 2011/12, compared with ...
-
News
Changing law firms' culture
Recently, the legal press has been full of reports of firms applying for alternative business structure (ABS) status. Notably, in the last couple of weeks we have learnt that Irwin Mitchell’s application has been granted and that insurance firm Parabis is set for a £50m cash injection after being granted ...