Michael Loveridge

  • Opinion

    Fully charged

    19 January 2015

    Cancellation of charges by mortgage lenders raises serious issues.

  • Opinion

    Poor application

    2014-12-09T11:45:00

    There is no obvious solution to an increasingly serious problem.

  • Opinion

    Unendurable online misery

    13 October 2014

    I spent an inordinate amount of time on the SRA’s painfully slow website.

  • Opinion

    Let us record proceedings

    01 July 2013

    Having just spent another couple of days frantically scribbling notes of the evidence being given and the judgment, I am again at a loss to understand why the lawyers involved in proceedings are not allowed to record them electronically.

  • News

    App lost in translation

    Archive

    I started reading the article in this week’s Gazette entitled ‘Release an app’, but abandoned it when I hit the following sentence: ‘Further critical success factors include: determining and engaging key internal and external stakeholders to deliver a user-focused product, and developing appropriate analytics and key performance indicators to measure ...

  • News

    Anachronistic nonsense

    2012-11-08T00:00:00

    Now that the Bar Council has decided to imitate the stupidity of our side of the profession and allow barristers to practise in an alternative business structure, why is it continuing to maintain the pretence of the cab-rank principle?

  • News

    Expensive Saga

    2012-10-25T00:00:00

    At the sort of prices Saga is quoting I do not think the average high street conveyancer should lose any sleep.

  • News

    Captured market

    2012-02-23T00:00:00

    In Today’s Conveyancer a Mr Pete Dockar, head of mortgages at HSBC, purports to deal with some questions about the new panel arrangements. As might be expected, the response is bland to the point of being useless, making vague and unsupported assertions about fraud. No doubt the answers given were ...

  • News

    Land bank offence

    2011-11-10T00:00:00

    Some solicitors will have become aware of ‘land banking’ operations over recent years. For those who are not aware, these involve a company buying a plot of agricultural land, setting up a scheme to make it look as though it has development potential, and then selling ‘plots’ at a huge ...

  • News

    It is illogical but...

    2011-06-16T00:00:00

    Myles Hickey is quite correct in that neither rule 22.1 of the CPR nor the Practice Direction 22 include the claim form itself in the list of documents that need to be verified by a statement of truth.

  • News

    Judicial error

    2010-04-09T00:00:00

    Reading the legal update report of Key v Key (see [2010] Gazette, 1 April, 14), I was struck by the judge’s emphasis on the so-called ‘golden rule’, namely that practitioners should arrange for an aged testator, or one who has been seriously ill, to be examined by and reported on ...

  • News

    Secret profit

    2010-01-14T00:00:00

    I would once have been astonished to read that we are now allowed to add a mark-up to counsel’s fees (see [2009] Gazette, 17 December, 2). Sadly, it is a sign of the times. This appears to be yet another example of professional standards being undermined by commercial expediency.