Headlines – Page 1467
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Solicitors rebut claim that they ‘overcharge’ for legal aid work
Solicitors hit back this week at claims that they have been overpaid by nearly £25m for legal aid work, blaming the ‘mountain of bureaucracy’ they face from the Legal Services Commission. A report by the National Audit Office said the LSC had overpaid solicitors by an ...
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UPDATE: Calls for end to single renewal date for PII
The Law Society’s council yesterday voted overwhelmingly in favour of pressuring the Solicitors Regulation Authority to abolish the single renewal date for professional indemnity insurance (PII), in favour of staggered renewals. Some 55 council members voted in favour of the move, with 14 against and three ...
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Exposing the pretence of clothing property with the value of goodwill
Goodwill is produced by, and only by, people and not by things they use in business, but confusion reigns. The purpose of this article is to expose the pretence of clothing real property, land, with the value of goodwill, which is a species of personal property.
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Exposing the pretence of clothing real property, land, with the value of goodwill
Goodwill is produced by, and only by, people and not by things they use in business, but confusion reigns. The purpose of this article is to expose the pretence of clothing real property, land, with the value of goodwill, which is a species of personal property.
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News
Lawyers provide £400m of pro bono work a year
The value of pro bono work done annually by lawyers has soared to more than £400m according to estimates published by the Law Society in advance of next week’s national pro bono week. The estimated value of the pro bono work performed by private practice solicitors ...
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My experience as a conveyancing client
They say moving home is one of the most stressful things you can do in life. Having just moved house myself, I can understand why. But it did at least provide me with a useful insight into the conveyancing process from a client’s perspective. And I’m afraid the news isn’t ...
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Law Society Council votes against referral fees
The Law Society will lobby the government and Legal Services Board to ban the use of referral fees by all providers of legal services. The Law Society’s council voted to change its policy on referral fees yesterday. It adopted a motion by council member Sue Carter ...
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Government offender management IT project a ‘shambles’
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has branded the government’s delayed and over-budget IT project to set up a single database to manage offenders through the prison and probation services a ‘shambles’, in a damning report published today. Five years after the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) ...
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Family judgments to be made available online in pilot areas
Judgments in some family cases will be made available online as part of a 12-month Ministry of Justice pilot, launched today. Family case decisions of the magistrates’ courts in Leeds and the magistrates’ court and county court in Cardiff will be published in what the MoJ ...
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Lawyers lick their lips over banking work
Today’s official (but much leaked) announcement of the government’s plans for Lloyds and RBS comes as both banks are carrying out reviews of their legal panels. Law firms big and small, in the City or in the regions, must be licking their lips at the thought of being party to ...
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Notaries in revolt
I had business with a notary this week. Visiting a notary in Belgium – I suspect the same holds true in all of the continental countries in which they practise – is like entering a scene from a 19th-century French novel. Typically, you are ushered into a specially furnished room, ...
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Law firm partners ‘overpaid’, says Mayson
Law firm partners are paying themselves too much and their businesses will struggle to attract external investment because they are not worth as much as the partners believe, a leading commentator has warned. Professor Stephen Mayson, director of the Legal Services Policy Institute, said partners have ...
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CPS publishes ethical principles
The director of public prosecutions has today published a ‘statement of ethical principles’, setting out what is expected of public prosecutors in England and Wales. Keir Starmer QC said the document, which sets out the ethical principles that underpin and guide the work of public prosecutors, ...
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Red tape cut for forced marriage orders
Local authorities can issue orders to protect vulnerable adults and children from being forced into marriage without seeking the leave of the court, under new powers introduced yesterday. Forced Marriage Protection Orders can include orders to compel a person to hand over passports to prevent someone ...
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LSC launches tender for Community Legal Advice Centre in Barking & Dagenham
The Legal Services Commission has announced the launch of a tender for the new £2.1m Community Legal Advice Centre (CLAC) in Barking & Dagenham. The new service to provide a one-stop-shop for legal advice and representation will be jointly funded by the LSC and Barking & ...
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Law firm standards should inform their commercial behaviour
Regular readers will know that I am an advocate of law firms getting their acts together as businesses, but this is not to say that solicitors should in any way give up the particularly high service standards set for the protection of clients’ best interests.
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Does the UK spend too much on legal aid?
England and Wales has ‘one of the highest per capita spends in the world’ on legal aid, the Ministry of Justice said this week. Well there’s no surprise there; that little snippet is regularly trotted out by the government when it is responding to Gazette reports on legal aid cuts.
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QLTS will ensure all UK solicitors will meet the highest standards
For several years the Solicitors Regulation Authority has been working on a new scheme to help ensure that the public can be confident that all solicitors, regardless of how they qualified, are competent to practise in England and Wales. The importance of this is indicated by the fact that about ...
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Data page for October 2009
The data page is the financial rates and data complied for the Law Society Gazette by MoneyFacts Group, the UK's largest supplier of savings and mortgage data. DownloadsDownload the data page for October 2009 belowdata page 20 October 2009 (163kb)
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How law firms can use social networking to stay ahead of the pack
Over the past two years or so, the way solicitors network, interact and go about business development has undergone a profound, but almost unnoticed, change.Back in 2007, I wrote a feature for the Gazette on how social networking would change the way solicitors did business with each other and with ...