Latest news – Page 650
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News
Insurers under fire for ‘wasted costs’
The incoming leader of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers will go on the attack against insurers this week. Karl Tonks, incoming president of APIL, will use his inaugural speech on Thursday at the group’s annual conference to call for fairness in the civil litigation system. ...
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ABA rebuffs proposal for non-lawyer ownership
The American Bar Association has rejected any proposal to change its ban on non-lawyer ownership of firms. The ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 decided last week to uphold the prohibition after a three-year of consultation with the profession.
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Domestic violence concession as MPs back legal aid cuts
MPs overturned nearly all of the changes made by peers to the government’s proposed legal aid reforms, but in a key concession agreed to widen the evidential criteria required to grant legal aid to victims of domestic violence. In last night’s debate on the Legal Aid, ...
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Rights conference set to end in ‘fudge’
This week’s Brighton conference on the future of Europe’s human rights court will end in a meaningless ‘fudge’, with no serious debate to address the issues dividing the governments of the 47 European states attending, one of Britain’s leading political scientists has predicted. Dr Michael ...
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College of Law sold in £200m private equity deal
A private equity firm, Montagu, has bought the College of Law in a deal which it says has created a £200m charitable fund for legal education. The sale follows months of speculation, with Montagu Private Equity, media giant Pearson and Providence Private Equity all in the ...
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Consumer panel to probe financial protection arrangements
The ability of regulators’ financial protection arrangements to cope with the high level of firms in distress is to come under the scrutiny of the consumer legal watchdog. In its work programme for 2012-13, published today, the Legal Services Consumer Panel says the capacity of ...
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Ministers target child legal aid in fightback against bill amendments
The government says it will oppose all but three of the 11 amendments made by peers to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders bill when the measure returns to the Commons tomorrow. A government response to the Lords’ amendments, published on Friday afternoon, signals ...
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Harmonised standards the key to family mediation, says Djanogly
Improved regulation and harmonised professional standards would encourage the take up of family mediation, the justice minister said today. Jonathan Djanogly told a Law Society conference on family mediation that the government will work with family mediation services, through the Family Mediation Council (FMC) to achieve a ‘harmonised’ scheme of ...
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Hundreds of CMCs ‘cancelled’ by MoJ
The Ministry of Justice has closed down about one in five claims management companies in the past year, according to figures obtained by the Gazette. A freedom of information request to the MoJ’s Claims Management Regulation department has revealed that 734 businesses were ‘cancelled’ in ...
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Grieve: interpreter failure ‘not contempt’
The attorney general has declined a request to launch an action for contempt against a contractor accused of failing to supply court interpreters - but said that wasted costs orders could apply to such cases.
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Retain legal aid bill amendments, MPs urged
Opponents of the government’s legal aid reforms have united to lobby MPs to retain amendments made by peers when the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders bill returns to the Commons next week. The Law Society and Bar Council, together with bodies representing charities ...
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OFT door still open on HSBC panel investigation
The Law Society has responded robustly to last week’s suggestion that the Office of Fair Trading will not investigate HSBC over the small size of its conveyancing panel. Sole practitioner Elaine McGloin had complained that the lender’s action restricted freedom of consumer choice and was anti-competitive, but the watchdog told ...
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Serve deaf clients better 'or face claims'
Law firms could face unlimited discrimination claims from deaf and hard of hearing people if they continue failing to make ‘reasonable adjustments’, consumer watchdogs have warned.
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Law firm is business loan pioneer
An East Anglian high street firm is one of the first businesses in the country to secure a loan through a new government-backed financing scheme. Tees Solicitors, which has six offices across four counties, has obtained £2m from Barclays under the National Loan Guarantee Scheme announced ...
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Divorce mediation scheme ‘failing’
Courts are not checking whether divorcing couples have attended meetings to explore mediation and other alternatives before applying to start court proceedings, a survey has found. For the past year, parties have been required to attend mediation assessment and information meetings (MIAMs) to find out ...
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Asbestos victims hit by legislation delay
The government has admitted that a 2010 act designed to help people gain compensation for industrial diseases is unlikely to be implemented until 2013. The Third Parties (Rights Against Insurers) Act was pushed through two years ago to update legislation dating from 1930. It gave claimants, ...
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Advise courts of uncooperative clients, solicitors told
Criminal solicitors should tell the court when clients fail to co-operate with them, to avoid the risk of breaching their duty to the court, the Law Society has advised. Chancery Lane has issued an updated practice note setting out the duties and burdens affecting solicitors arising ...
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Why should solicitors pick up the tab?
The article by District Judge Richard Chapman was surely four days too late for the April Fool joke that I assume it was.
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Obligations first
Articles entitled ‘Some "rights" have limitations appear when a system of law espouses a doctrine of rights that has no, or at best an attenuated, concept of obligations as the correlative of rights. As Immanuel Kant explained during the Enlightenment and Onora O’Neill outlined more recently in her Reith Lectures ...
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The right address
I was interested by Ian Kinloch’s letter in which he refers to a German solicitor being addressed as Herr Doktor. I hold the Institute of Linguists diploma in French and liaised with a monolingual French notaire on behalf of a client buying a holiday home in the Dordogne. Leaving aside ...