All articles by Eduardo Reyes – Page 33
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News
Lawyers fight town hall cuts
A group of City pro bono lawyers is taking aim at local authority cuts affecting vulnerable elderly and disabled residents. The lawyers will scrutinise care fee contracts that councils seek to vary, and bring judicial reviews of cuts estimated to add up to £1bn. ...
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Merger threat to Whitehall lawyers
Government lawyers fear cost-cutting consolidation plans will lead to big job losses and attacks on their employment conditions. The merger of legal functions appears set to incorporate cuts deeper than envisaged in the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review. Correspondence seen by the ...
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Profile
Interview: Lord McNally
At a press conference following David Cameron’s only major government reshuffle, justice minister Lord McNally reflected that he might owe his position as sole surviving minister in the Ministry of Justice more to his status as a Liberal Democrat than other factors.
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What government legal service mergers mean
Should the merger of government legal functions – the so-called ‘shared services’ model – be of concern to the lawyers affected? It isn’t scare-mongering to say that for many it should, even though the immediate effect may be minimal. The shared services programme is separate ...
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News
How To: use social media
The normally sure-footed John Lewis Partnership demonstrated the risks of ‘engaging’ with shoppers through Twitter in September, when its upmarket grocer, Waitrose, urged people to complete the Tweet: ‘I shop at Waitrose because...’. What came back in this open forum was not the anticipated free endorsement of its products by ...
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News
Kent firm Cripps brings in property expert
Expertise from the property industry is to guide expansion at Kent firm Cripps Harries Hall, the latest law firm to announce the appointment of a high-profile non-executive consultant. Christopher Digby-Bell (pictured), a director and general counsel at property investment business Palmer Capital, has been appointed ...
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News
Scot-free banking
‘Unbelievable!!!’ was the striking line in an email I received earlier this week from a trusted contact. It referenced a reported request by John Cridland, director general of the Confederation of British Industry, for banks to be protected from lawsuits related to the sale of products linked to Libor. ‘It ...
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News
PII warning over unrated insurers
Cash-strapped law firms have been driven to obtaining professional indemnity insurance from unrated insurers this year, risking regulatory sanctions where an insurer becomes insolvent, a leading broker and the Law Society have warned. Unrated firms, listed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, are those without a ...
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Profile
Interview: Stephen Denyer
It is not unusual to plan for the future, or to ask questions about how key changes might affect a business’s prospects. But few, if any, law firms do so as publicly as the £1.9bn-turnover global elite firm Allen & Overy. The results of the firm’s collective reflections – on ...
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News
Justice on the cheap
The act of stripping out costs and processes occupies a huge acreage of business theory, and was a mainstream preoccupation for senior management even in better economic times. Policymakers, thinktank researchers and civil service fast-streamers all have ‘magpie’ tendencies, and staring at tight and vanishing budgets, one can see why ...
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News
Human trafficking victims failed by defence teams, CCRC alleges
Many victims of human trafficking are being failed by defence teams, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) warned this week. All have ignored clear law in numerous prosecutions, it alleges. The commission says there are numerous cases where inadequate ...
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News
Lawyers should not fear Scottish independence
The signs are that lawyers have little to fear from Scottish independence. Of course with the polls currently showing a clear majority against independence, that reassurance may remain an academic comfort for the legal profession. But of the many arguments that will be wheeled out against independence – from Nato ...
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News
Top firms risk collapse, US economist warns
The very largest corporate law firms are wedded to an unsustainable business model designed around support for their own massive overheads, one of the US’s leading general counsel has warned, predicting more collapses like that of US firm Dewey LeBoeuf. Michael Trotter, now with US firm ...
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News
Roundtable: the changing role of corporate counsel
In-house lawyers in commerce and industry operate in a landscape that has changed hugely since the turn of the millennium. This new terrain has been shaped by across-the-board growth in the demands of regulators, investors and legislators worldwide, and by an increased sensitivity to litigation risks.
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News
Labour starts to move on from extradition errors
The Labour party has struggled with the controversial issue of the extradition arrangements it agreed with the US and other states when in government. When home secretary Theresa May announced that she would block the extradition of ‘Pentagon Hacker’ Gary McKinnon in the Commons, and ...
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News
‘Forum bar’ pledge as May blocks McKinnon extradition
Members on all sides of the House of Commons today cheered home secretary Theresa May’s announcement that she would block the extradition of ‘Pentagon hacker’ Gary McKinnon (pictured). She said she had examined medical evidence, and concluded that if extradited to the US there was a high risk that McKinnon ...
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News
Drafting a constitution
At the heart of any failed state is a constitution that is not performing – either because the balances its drafters struck between competing demands on the document were wrong, or because the machinery, will and resources to make it work are woefully inadequate.
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News
Surge in mis-selling claims
Small businesses are rushing to file mis-selling claims against their banks before April, when the Jackson reforms make conditional fee agreements a less viable option. Campaigning organisation Bully Banks, which has been co-ordinating information and campaigns on allegedly mis-sold interest rate hedging products, has urged ...
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News
What should lawyers make of EBaccs?
What sort of education should lawyers want there to be in our schools? It is the perfect time to ask this, as changes to GCSEs - specifically the introduction of the ‘English Baccalaureate’ (EBacc) in six core subjects - are in part prompted by those who purport to speak for ...
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News
Could a cover-up on the scale of Hillsborough happen again?
I was in Sheffield the day of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. Not at the Sheffield Wednesday ground, but just over a mile south at the university, at a conference for youth and student groups. Of course no one had a mobile phone, so news filtered in slowly with whispers and ...