Headlines – Page 1183
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Hundreds of CMCs ‘cancelled’ by MoJ
The Ministry of Justice has closed down about one in five claims management companies in the past year, according to figures obtained by the Gazette. A freedom of information request to the MoJ’s Claims Management Regulation department has revealed that 734 businesses were ‘cancelled’ in ...
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Grieve: interpreter failure ‘not contempt’
The attorney general has declined a request to launch an action for contempt against a contractor accused of failing to supply court interpreters - but said that wasted costs orders could apply to such cases.
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Retain legal aid bill amendments, MPs urged
Opponents of the government’s legal aid reforms have united to lobby MPs to retain amendments made by peers when the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders bill returns to the Commons next week. The Law Society and Bar Council, together with bodies representing charities ...
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OFT door still open on HSBC panel investigation
The Law Society has responded robustly to last week’s suggestion that the Office of Fair Trading will not investigate HSBC over the small size of its conveyancing panel. Sole practitioner Elaine McGloin had complained that the lender’s action restricted freedom of consumer choice and was anti-competitive, but the watchdog told ...
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Serve deaf clients better 'or face claims'
Law firms could face unlimited discrimination claims from deaf and hard of hearing people if they continue failing to make ‘reasonable adjustments’, consumer watchdogs have warned.
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Law firm is business loan pioneer
An East Anglian high street firm is one of the first businesses in the country to secure a loan through a new government-backed financing scheme. Tees Solicitors, which has six offices across four counties, has obtained £2m from Barclays under the National Loan Guarantee Scheme announced ...
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Divorce mediation scheme ‘failing’
Courts are not checking whether divorcing couples have attended meetings to explore mediation and other alternatives before applying to start court proceedings, a survey has found. For the past year, parties have been required to attend mediation assessment and information meetings (MIAMs) to find out ...
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Lawyer foot soldiers of the Big Society need a state-maintained road to march on
This week chancellor George Osborne received a bloody nose from charities which estimate their finances will be hard hit by his decision to place a cap on tax relief for charitable donations. His move may or may not be right in principle. But as with ...
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Asbestos victims hit by legislation delay
The government has admitted that a 2010 act designed to help people gain compensation for industrial diseases is unlikely to be implemented until 2013. The Third Parties (Rights Against Insurers) Act was pushed through two years ago to update legislation dating from 1930. It gave claimants, ...
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Advise courts of uncooperative clients, solicitors told
Criminal solicitors should tell the court when clients fail to co-operate with them, to avoid the risk of breaching their duty to the court, the Law Society has advised. Chancery Lane has issued an updated practice note setting out the duties and burdens affecting solicitors arising ...
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Defence firms should make the move to digital working
by Peter Lewis, head of the CJS Efficiency Programme The government has committed to providing a simpler, swifter and more transparent criminal justice service and, as part of this, the core agencies of the criminal justice system (CJS) have committed to ‘going digital’.
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Why should solicitors pick up the tab?
The article by District Judge Richard Chapman was surely four days too late for the April Fool joke that I assume it was.
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Obligations first
Articles entitled ‘Some "rights" have limitations appear when a system of law espouses a doctrine of rights that has no, or at best an attenuated, concept of obligations as the correlative of rights. As Immanuel Kant explained during the Enlightenment and Onora O’Neill outlined more recently in her Reith Lectures ...
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The right address
I was interested by Ian Kinloch’s letter in which he refers to a German solicitor being addressed as Herr Doktor. I hold the Institute of Linguists diploma in French and liaised with a monolingual French notaire on behalf of a client buying a holiday home in the Dordogne. Leaving aside ...
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Greed is not good
‘New York has nothing to fear from alternative business structures’, says the Law Society president. As a solicitor who retired about 10 years ago, I wish to express my astonishment at that statement. Mr Wotton has a short memory concerning the so-called liberalisation of the ...
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Titanic undertaking
Astute readers may already have noticed that tomorrow [Saturday 14th April] is the 100th anniversary of the RMS Titanic striking an iceberg.
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Dress pass
Even in these casual days, turning up in court inappropriately attired remains the stuff of solicitors’ nightmares. Kevan Lines, of Abertillery firm Lewis & Lines, recalls a ghastly incident a couple of years ago (before the firm gave up publicly funded criminal work). ‘I was phoned by a legal adviser ...
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Moot point
Leeds University Law School’s team narrowly beat City University Law School in the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting’s annual mooting competition. In the finals, held at the Law Society, the mooting problem focused on a Court of Appeal case concerning a possible murder charge over a decision to withhold treatment ...
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ET or not ET? That is the question
When an employment lawyer dies it must be tempting for those left behind to draw upon the career of the deceased when considering an inscription for the tombstone. Some may aspire to the simple phrase: ‘He lived as he died; scandalous, vexatious and with no reasonable prospect of success.’ For ...