Last 3 months headlines – Page 1472
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Personal injury ad ban appeal
The government should not rush to amend personal injury advertising rules, the chair of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said last week. In the first parliamentary debate on Lord Young’s ‘compensation culture’ report, which took place in the House of Lords last week, Lord Smith of ...
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MoJ calls for data on RTA portal abuses
Solicitors and insurers must hand over data that exposes abuses of the road traffic accident claims portal to the Ministry of Justice, a key official said last week. Kevin Westall, head of civil justice policy, procedure and customer intelligence at the MoJ, told the Motor Accident ...
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Insurers seek to pursue solicitors over whiplash fraud claims
The insurance industry is seeking to pursue solicitors whom it believes are involved in fraudulent whiplash claims, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) has said. James Dalton, ABI assistant director of motor and liability, told delegates at the Motor Accident Solicitors Society annual conference last ...
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Fixed-share partner loses appeal
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has upheld an earlier ruling that a solicitor who was a fixed-share partner in a Bournemouth law firm is not entitled to seek to claim unfair dismissal from the firm, because he cannot be classed as an ‘employee’. Martin Tiffin, a former ...
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Moses backs jury questions in criminal trials
Judges should present a list of questions to jurors in criminal trials to guide them in reaching a verdict, a senior judge suggested last week. Lord Justice Moses said the move, which was recommended in Lord Justice Auld’s 2001 review of the criminal courts, would reduce ...
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Called to the bar
The Ministry of Justice’s consultation on court closures – sorry, modernising and improving the courts – closed in September, but Obiter nonetheless hopes that his honour Anthony Bradbury’s book, Early London County Courts, is on the justice ministers’ Christmas reading lists. The ministers, Obiter knows, like to think outside the ...
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Demo-crazy
Last week’s meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Legal Aid, at which justice minister Jonathan Djanogly was available to answer questions, was packed out by lawyers (even though a few legal bigwigs, including Bar Council chair Nick Green QC, had to miss out because they were stuck behind ...
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Financial crutch
The chaps at Cheltenham personal injury firm Ross Aldridge must really have the gift of the gab. Despite reports that banks have cooled off on lending to law firms, the firm has just secured a whopping £1m funding package from Barclays Corporate, under the Government Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme. What’s ...
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Bunga-Bunga
Delegates at Inner Temple last week must have been wondering what they had let themselves in for when Lord Justice Moses began the annual law reform lecture.
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How the property market is changing as law firms weigh up office space
There is a strong sense that the property market is changing in important ways for law firms of all sizes as occupiers.
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We must not stand by and let government devastate access to justice
On 12 November I stood in a muddy field in Runnymede and listened to the great and the good, including justice secretary Ken Clarke, hail the Magna Carta as the foundation of fundamental rights and the protector of human freedom and civil rights. Chief among those rights are equality before ...
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The inspiration behind the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law
by Professor Jeffrey Jowell QC, the inaugural director of the Bingham Centre The Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law will be formally launched at the Royal Courts of Justice on 6 December. Supreme Court president Lord Phillips will preside over a meeting addressed by ...
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Audit training
A law degree (or CPD) plus Legal Practice Course is insufficient preparation for practice, and so there has to be an element of practical training. At the moment there is little quality control of training contracts; if you can last the two years, then you are in. ...
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Building quality
As chairman of the Conveyancing Association, I am writing to lend the support of our body to the Law Society Conveyancing Quality Scheme. Members of the association, which include a significant proportion of large conveyancers, fully support and endorse all efforts to improve the legal process of conveyancing. ...
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Be realistic about legal aid cuts
I do not think we can fault the reasoning behind the legal aid cuts, which largely preserve funding for the essential areas of human rights. We should be realistic and admit that some areas of law are not priorities, and one wonders why they were ever included in the scheme ...
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Injustice of legal aid cuts
I observed the following incident at a north London magistrates’ court. A defendant, who was clearly mentally ill, had been charged with an offence that was contrary to section 5 of the Public Order Act. The facts were that he had been shouting at a ...
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Which PEST is bothering your firm?
It will be 2011 in a few weeks and whenever your year-end is, planning for the coming year raises some interesting questions. What factors will affect the business planning for your firm? Here’s a standard business analysis tool that seems very relevant to solicitors firms since there seems to be ...
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Green pioneers slash carbon footprints
Almost 40% of law firms in the Legal Sector Alliance (LSA) have cut their carbon footprints in the last year, according to the alliance’s annual report, released today. In 2010, the average amount of carbon generated per LSA member employee varied between 0.48 and 8.94 tonnes, ...
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'Mixed practice' warning for publicly funded barristers
Incoming Bar Council chairman Peter Lodder QC today warned publicly funded barristers to diversify or face a bleak future. Legal aid rate cuts have been ‘too numerous and too deep’ for young barristers to survive on that single source of income, he told Bar ...