Last 3 months headlines – Page 2853
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Ministry IT costs soar as deadline looms
Numbers of temporary staff working on the Ministry of Justice’s £500m National Offender Management Service (NOMS) IT system have soared as the government rushes to complete projects before the general election, research has revealed. NOMS aims to share data across 125 prisons and 35 probation services. The project is due ...
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Acted for Ian Brady in prison application
Who? Corinne Singer, 51, a mental health consultant at virtual national firm Scott-Moncrieff & Associates (Scomo). Why is she in the news? Acted for moors murderer Ian Brady in his application to be moved from Ashworth maximum security hospital back to prison. Singer submitted that, because Brady is not benefiting ...
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Magna Carta: four of a kind
With one caveat, Obiter is delighted with the plan to bring the four surviving original copies of Magna Carta into one place to kick off the 800th anniversary year in 2015. The unification, supported by magic circle firm Linklaters, will provide a one-off chance to see the four extant copies ...
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SRA to fast track ABS applications
The Solicitors Regulation Authority will fast track alternative business structure applications from firms seeking to bid for new criminal legal aid contracts, it has been revealed. In a letter to the House of Commons Justice Committee, SRA board chair Charles Plant said that ABS applications from non-traditional law firms could ...
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TSol set for major recruitment push
Whitehall’s central legal services provider the Treasury Solicitors Department (TSol) is to recruit 40 lawyers after spending nearly £4.6m on temporary staff through outsourcer Capita, the Gazette can reveal. The recruitment campaign is for advisory, commercial, employment and litigation lawyers at civil service grade 7, with salaries between £47,086 and ...
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SRA to rubber stamp next phase of red tape cuts
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has said it is open to further ideas for cutting regulation after several demands from members of the profession. The regulator is this week expected to rubber stamp the second phase of its programme to reduce red tape. Under the new reforms, compliance officers will no ...
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Trainee retention rates rise at top City firms
The proportion of trainees winning places at top firms has increased this year to an average of 83%, figures for the September intake show. Magic circle firm Slaughter and May reported the highest retention rate, 90%, offering placements to 46 trainees. Rival Clifford Chance said 80% of its 60 trainees ...
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Win tickets to West End play based in PI firm
Britain’s hottest young playwright, Nick Payne, has picked the claims management industry as the subject of his new play, The Same Deep Water as Me, at London’s Donmar Warehouse. The witty and biting portrait of contemporary Britain is set in Scorpion Claims, ‘Luton’s finest personal injury lawyers’, where, apparently a ...
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SRA intervenes after solicitor arrested
A solicitor from Cheshire has been suspended from practising after he was arrested on suspicion of fraud. The Solicitors Regulation Authority today intervened to prevent partner Andrew Taylor from practising at his firm in Cheadle. Police confirmed last week that they had arrested a 56-year-old man on suspicion of fraud ...
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Troubled Challinors owes £11.2m, draft statement of affairs reveals
Troubled Midlands firm Challinors owes more than £11.2m to unsecured creditors as it prepares to go into administration. The firm yesterday confirmed it has filed notice of its intention to appoint administrators and is in talks with insolvency practitioners KSA Group about the future of the business. A draft statement ...
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Firms still hostile to judicial ambitions
More than half (57%) of solicitors eligible for judicial appointment say that they could not rely on the support of their firms when applying for the bench, according to research to be published by the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC), the Gazette can reveal. In contrast, 80% of barristers are confident ...
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What the election result will mean for the legal profession
Unless they are unusually concentrated in marginal constituencies, the votes of UK solicitors are unlikely to swing the outcome of the general election in three weeks’ time. However, the main parties’ manifestos have much to say about the law (especially where it relates to crime, human rights and civil liberty), ...
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A swift and sure way to computer disaster
Here we go again. Just two years after a new government promised to break with Labour’s record of IT-based policy fiascoes, along comes a high-profile public policy reform which looks set to go down the same dismal road. The success of the revolution set out in the Swift and Sure ...
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Cry freedom of information
The eyes of the news media have been elsewhere, but the House of Commons justice committee has just restated an important constitutional principle: freedom of information is a good thing. A long-awaited post-legislative review of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 concludes: ‘We do not believe that there has been ...
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Contact details
Why are addresses and telephone numbers so frequently omitted from email communications (despite the plethora of disclaimers etc attached)? Why in the most elaborate websites is ‘contact us’ the hardest or last thing to find? Why is there a tendency on the part, usually of the most prestigious firms, to ...
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Cashflow outlook worsening, new LMS quarterly survey shows
Cashflow problems are worsening for law firms, according to results from the Law Society’s Law Management Section (LMS) financial benchmarking quarterly. The survey, the first results of which are to be published tomorrow, found that 40% of firms were experiencing more cashflow pressures than in the previous quarter. Firms' responses ...
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Maggie Maggie Maggie! In in in!
The last time I was in the same room as Margaret Thatcher, several hundred Japanese businessmen were there, too. It was Tokyo, September 1989, the high noon of Japan's economic power. World leaders were passing through every week to pay homage to the yen, but prime minister Thatcher was different. ...
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Bring out your dead
If 200 people in England and Wales dropped dead one week from a mysterious unknown cause, you’d think our supposedly nanny state would learn about it right away.
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Cold called
To be honest, I knew I was asking for trouble by picking up the phone at teatime. The only calls that come through on that particular landline are from investment advisers or chaps asking for my passwords so they can fix my IT. Sure enough, when I picked up the ...
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Chilling effect
As a media legal scandal, it didn’t amount to much: no superinjunctions, celebrities or retired police horses. But my one (so far - touch wood) experience of being sued for defamation as a journalist illustrates an important shortcoming of the government’s current proposals for libel reform.