Last 3 months headlines – Page 1400
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News
Most solicitors will support panel’s call for will-writing to be made a reserved activity
Fledgling watchdog the Legal Services Consumer Panel has hitherto manifested a laissez-faire attitude to the post-Legal Services Act market - most notably perhaps by declining the opportunity to call for a ban on referral fees. So its pronouncements today on will-writing go against the grain. ...
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How could activities at News International be treated as something separate from its BSkyB bid?
by Sarah Davis, group commercial legal director at Guardian Media Group Never mind a week; a day is a long time in the politics of media regulation.
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Phone-hacking scandal has obscured other important stories
Last week was not a very good time to be a reporter - although it helped if you had never been employed by one of Rupert Murdoch’s diminishing stable of newspapers. It looks as if journalists, like solicitors, are about to lose the privilege of ...
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The judiciary – still too pale, male and stale?
There was a time, in those unreconstructed days before the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC), when a woman would be turned down for judicial appointment simply because her skirt was deemed too short. Or she looked bookish or spinsterish or headmistressy. Or wore ...
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Practising fee to fall 23%
The Law Society Council today approved a reduction in the individual practising certificate fee for next year of 23%, reflecting the ‘reduced funding requirement’ of the Law Society Group. The individual PC fee will drop from £428 to £328 to reflect the £94.8m net funding ...
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Has the once weak SRA morphed into the Incredible Hulk?
Are we seeing some sort of metamorphosis over at the SRA? This week saw the kind of rhetoric that will put the frighteners on any law firm veering dangerously close to the red. The language used on a report into outstanding premiums ...
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Mid-market firms review strategy ahead of alternative business structures
More than a third of mid-market law firms have changed their business strategies in the last year in response to the Legal Services Act. A survey of 101 firms, commissioned by legal information provider Lexis Nexis, also found that a further quarter will alter their structure ...
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ABS timetable in danger of slipping
The Solicitors Regulation Authority may not be ready to license alternative business structures from the target date of 6 October. SRA chairman Charles Plant told the regulator’s monthly board meeting today that the authority’s preparations for the change remain on schedule. ...
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Professional indemnity choices
Indemnity - like Christmas - comes just once a year, which is a relief in many ways. And like Christmas we face it with good intentions to plan ahead and get everything ready on time. However well prepared we mean to be, somehow time catches ...
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Allen & Overy investigates allegations that it was tricked
Magic circle firm Allen & Overy has said it is ‘looking into’ the allegation made yesterday that it was tricked into handing over details relating to former prime minister Gordon Brown to a conman. An article in today’s Guardian newspaper claims that that lawyers at Allen ...
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IAS blames legal aid cuts for its collapse
The Immigration Advisory Service (IAS) has asked clients not to attempt to visit its offices and has blamed government legal aid cuts for going into administration. IAS, the UK’s largest provider of publicly funded immigration and asylum legal advice, went into administration over the weekend. ...
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European Commission focuses on flaws in the auditing market
Like a glacier, the European Commission is slowly moving to deal with the auditing profession for their controversial role in the economic crisis, and generally in relation to the profession’s structural faults. As I have written before, it is about time that this issue came ...
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NHS lawyers warned government that reforms would escalate its costs
NHS lawyers warned the government before it published its bill on legal aid reform that scrapping legal aid for clinical negligence claims would ‘massively’ escalate NHS legal costs, and leave some seriously injured people unable to bring cases. In its response to the government’s cost-cutting consultation ...
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ARP firms still owe £8.46m
Law firms in the Assigned Risks Pool still owe £8.46 million in premiums, despite debts falling during 2011. Outstanding premiums have come down from £9.3 million at the end of March this year as regulators clamp down on non-paying firms. The Solicitors ...
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Immigration Advisory Service in administration
The Immigration Advisory Service, a charity that gives telephone advice to 36,000 clients and opens 7,000 appeal files every year, went into administration over the weekend. Cuts to legal aid are thought to be one reason for the charity’s financial problems. According ...
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Privacy, rights and vulnerable people
You might have missed it, but semi-obscured by the unfolding drama over phone-hacking at News of the World, other - I think more interesting - privacy issues have been in the news and on our screens in the past few weeks. The balance of human ...
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Thousands of clients ‘stranded’ following IAS collapse
The collapse of not-for-profit immigration advice provider the Immigration Advisory Service (IAS) will leave thousands of clients without representation, the Law Society warned today. IAS’s legal aid contract allowed it to take on 26,700 new cases a year. It is not ...
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Disgruntled clients: the Ombudsman gives us a glimpse
This week the Legal Ombudsman took a small baby step on a very long and distant path that may - or may not - ultimately end in the publication of complaints upheld by LeO against named law firms. That may or may not happen, and ...
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News
‘No political will’ to reform marriage laws
There is ‘no political will’ to address the record levels of family breakdown that currently cost the country an estimated £40-100bn a year, a leading family lawyer claimed during a Law Society public debate yesterday. Ayesha Vardag, principal of London firm Vardags, one of a panel ...
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Government ‘sympathetic’ to introducing referral fee ban
The government is ‘sympathetic’ to the idea of banning referral fees, Ministry of Justice minister Lord McNally told the House of Lords yesterday. McNally said that if public opinion demands a ban, the government will respond to that demand. In ...