Last 3 months headlines – Page 1266
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Local government: standards regime; disability payment challenge
So, farewell then, the Model Code of Conduct Order 2007. As 6 June saw the long-overdue birth of the (almost) final statutory measures to launch the new and battle-scarred standards regime, on 1 July the ancien standards régime was quietly euthanised - subject to the temporary reprieve of a few ...
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PII special: guidance for firms
There is now a great deal of information and guidance available to help legal practices find the right professional indemnity insurance (PII) package for their needs. I hope that legal practices will not go into the renewal process without using this free advice.
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MoJ ‘hell-bent’ on expanding RTA process
The government this week rejected calls to tear up its timetable for boosting the role of the RTA portal for low-value claims - despite a call by its own expert adviser for a pause. In a long-awaited report published on the day before parliament’s summer recess, ...
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Intellectual property
Interlocutory - Damages not appropriate remedy EMI (IP) Ltd v British Sky Broadcasting Group plc: Chancery Division (Mr John Baldwin QC (Sitting as a Deputy Judge of the Chancery Division)): 25 June 2012 ...
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PII special: pooling resources
One of the major challenges we have faced in recent times as a public interest regulator has been to ensure that we have professional indemnity insurance (PII) arrangements in place which provide the required level of consumer protection and are sustainable for the long term.
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PII special: top tips
Over 10,000 firms of solicitors in England and Wales will again be pulling together their applications for professional indemnity insurance (PII) renewal. Preparation is paramount because, as we all know, the 1 October deadline always comes too soon. As has been the case for several years now, insurers remain cautious ...
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Plans to rush cases through system are half-baked and dangerous
by Julian Young senior partner of central London firm Julian Young & Co and a solicitor-advocate We are seeing an increasing number of initiatives from ministers and civil servants to rush cases through the lower courts at breakneck speed.
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Dabbling in politics
Just what is going on with our leading firms? Last week the Guardian reported that the big cheeses of the accountancy world - KPMG, PwC, Deloitte and Ernst & Young - were almost permanent fixtures in the corridors of power. Electoral Commission figures showed the firms had donated £1.9m in ...
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Mine's a Baileys
Still humbled by the phenomenal response to the legal cocktail competition, Obiter’s representatives on earth (the Gazette editorial team) set out to test the winning cocktails as promised.
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Watch your language
Obiter commends HM Judiciary for the commendable dispatch with which it now distributes judgments to media organisations - a real boon, this. And we have enormous sympathy on those not infrequent occasions when its good intentions fall foul of ever more zealous internet firewalls. So it was that news of ...
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Memory lane
That a tendency towards self-advertisement is a most serious defect in the character of a solicitor has recently been rather forcibly brought home to me. An article of mine on a religious subject appeared in the May issue of our parish magazine. The editor, approving its ...
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‘Bill of Rights’ consultation shows how bad laws get made
For anyone curious to see the process of rubbish ideas being turned into statutes that operate sub-optimally, I recommend reading the second consultation of the ‘Commission on a Bill of Rights’. This is not to say that Sir Hugh Lewis, the commission’s chair, is ...
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Lloyds deal opens way to Co-op expansion
The Co-operative Group could sell legal services from almost 1,000 bank branches, giving it an outlet on nearly every high street in the country following a deal to buy 632 Lloyds TSB and Cheltenham & Gloucester branches. The group announced this morning that it had agreed ...
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Appeal to test article eight right over private property
Squatters occupying the likely site of Heathrow’s proposed third runway were yesterday given a six-week stay of eviction to appeal under article eight of the Human Rights Act, the right to home and family life. The site is privately owned and this will be the first ...
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MPs slam Cameron’s shared parenting plan
The chair of the commons Justice Select Committee has written to the prime minister expressing ‘great concern’ over plans to change the Children Act to promote shared parenting. In a robust letter Sir Alan Beith sets out the cross-party committee’s opposition to the government’s proposal ...
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Wheeldon should get the Buckles treatment
Just as respectable physicists once believed in the luminiferous ether, the mainstream commentariat has long been bewitched by the notion that public services are better and more efficiently run by organisations energised by the profit motive. A neoliberal article of faith for both main parties in recent years, it was ...
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Intellectual property
Infringement - Use of similar trademark - ‘Budweiser’ Budejovicky Budvar Narodni Podnik v Anheuser-Busch Inc: CA (Civ Div) (Lord Justice Ward, Mr Justice Warren, Sir Robin Jacob): 3 July 2012 ...
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EU
Commission - Decision - Applicant software company found to have abused dominant position in PC operating system market Microsoft Corporation v European Commission: General Court of the European Union (Second Chamber) (Judges Forwood (rapporteur) (president), Dehousse, Schwarcz): 27 June ...