Headlines – Page 1169
-
News
Local government
Council tax - Respondent being non-British spouse of foreign student Harrow Borough of London v Ayiku: Queen's Bench Division, Administrative Court (London) (Mr Justice Sales): 9 May 2012 The Administrative ...
-
News
Conveyancing panels
The recent announcement of automatic admission for CQS firms to the HSBC panel is a welcome return to normality. Perhaps not quite ‘as you were’, but a major step towards recognition that the best interests of our clients and their borrowers are served by a diversity of choice within the ...
-
News
Unity is strength
Des Hudson and Avtar Bhatoa’s remarks (Hudson: bar strike would ‘damage profession’) will, regrettably, be music to Whitehall’s ears. The criminal bar does not want to strike. Over a number of years, we have lobbied and campaigned in the public interest against reforms and cuts ...
-
News
No slave labour
In his Comment Hekim Hannan states: ‘Why take on a trainee in Sept 2013, pay them £33,300 over two years when you could take on a paralegal on the minimum wage... give them a training contract the following year and pay £33,195 over a three-year period’. ...
-
News
Training woes
Susan Singleton clearly does not ‘get’ how hard it is these days to qualify and how much competition there is. I agree that persistence does usually pay off. However, with tuition fees now at £9,000 a year for a law degree, not to mention the Legal ...
-
News
What’s in a name?
There may be a very good reason why solicitors are reluctant to give their names to reporters after representing their clients in the local magistrates’ court. Reporters never write it down correctly and always get it wrong. I have never lived down a report in our ...
-
News
Keep out of politics
The Law Society says that government plans to make it easier for small businesses to dismiss employees will not help those businesses to grow. The Society’s Employment Law Committee chairman’s views to this effect were quoted in a Society press release.
-
News
Banking on caution
Christopher Digby-Bell’s letter urging lawyers to rein in their banking clients rang a bell with me. In the early 1970s, when I was working as a newly qualified solicitor for a magic circle firm, I raised a query with a secondary banking client concerning the wisdom of some of their ...
-
News
Red-tape bonfire plan for legal services bureaucracy
The government will today invite the legal profession to identify business-restricting regulations, naming three ‘sector champions’ as intermediaries. In the legal services stage of prime minister David Cameron’s ‘red tape challenge’ the Ministry of Justice has pinpointed more than 150 regulations suitable for scrutiny. Lawyers will ...
-
News
'Self-serving' interpreter figures slammed
The shadow justice minister has criticised as ‘self-serving’ performance data released on the company contracted to provide court interpreters. The data, published by the Ministry of Justice last week, revealed that hundreds of cases were still being disrupted by a shortage of interpreters three months into the contract. ...
-
News
Plaid Cymru hails legal devolution
Plaid Cymru’s Westminster leader Elfyn Llwyd has insisted Wales can benefit from a separate legal jurisdiction - despite warnings it may harm the principality’s appeal to business. Llywd told the House of Commons last week that there would be legal and economic advantages to devolving the administration of justice. ...
-
News
Reserved service plea by Society over immigration advice
Immigration advice should become a reserved legal activity to prevent non-authorised persons causing ‘consumer detriment’, the Law Society argues today. In a response to a Legal Services Board discussion paper, the Society offers to help assure quality standards by ‘providing further adjuncts’ to its Immigration ...
-
News
Government move to replace tribunal judges splits profession
Government plans to save time in employment tribunals by using ‘legal officers’ in place of judges appear to have split the profession. One employment specialist described the idea as ‘short-sighted and utterly wrong’, while another told the Gazette that any innovation that ‘allows heads to ...
-
News
Clarke plea on prisons population
Justice secretary Kenneth Clarke has called for a ‘pause’ in prison population growth as the numbers creep closer to the UK’s operational capacity. At a hearing of the Commons Justice Committee last week Clarke described overcrowding in UK prisons as ‘one of the scourges of ...
-
News
Law Society responds to training review
Bottlenecks in the legal training system are inevitable so long as there are more aspiring entrants to the profession than the market can employ, the Law Society points out in its first formal response to the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR). The response is broadly in favour of the ...
-
News
Arbitrary decisions
Picture this: an international arbitration, millions of dollars at stake; an expert is called to give evidence on damages right at the end of the hearing. This is what he says happened: ‘Everyone had flown miles to come to the arbitration. I was the last witness. One of the counsel ...
-
News
Government must not ignore Strasbourg’s overtures on prisoner voting
How did the government get itself into such a mess over prisoners voting? After human rights judges stretched out the hand of friendship to the UK last week, David Cameron promptly bit it off, willingly giving parliament an undertaking that he would not succumb to what one MP had described ...
-
News
Chinese law firm looks to build UK ‘bridge’
A ‘win-win’ relationship forged between UK solicitors and one of China’s largest law firms could see UK practitioners claiming their share of China’s rapidly growing legal services market, the Gazette was told last week.
-
News
Patent court decision 'worth £3bn a year to UK'
The UK legal sector could lose almost £3bn a year if the proposed new European central patents court is not based in London, the Law Society claimed this week.