Latest news – Page 739
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News
Mystery shoppers to test will-writers
Mystery shoppers will test the service provided by will-writers early next year, as part of a Legal Services Board project. Research agency IFF Research has been commissioned by the LSB, the Legal Services Consumer Panel and the Office of Fair Trading to recruit individuals to report ...
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Government proposes 50% sentence cut for guilty pleas
Defendants who plead guilty at the earliest stage could receive a 50% reduction in their sentence, under government proposals outlined today in a green paper on the sentencing and rehabilitation of offenders. The plan is designed to tackle the problem that the paper calls ‘one of ...
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Academics warn against restricting qualifying law degrees
Proposals to tighten the regulation of collaborative arrangements between law schools in the UK and overseas are ‘unfortunate’ in an increasingly global market, and will encourage box-ticking rather than an evaluative approach, academics have warned. Collaborative arrangements for Qualifying Law Degrees (QLD) allow the delivery of ...
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Firms tighten spending on support staff and training
Law firms are controlling costs in the economic downturn by increasing the ratio of fee-earners to support staff and by spending less on learning and development, a survey has revealed. The survey of 47 medium to large firms by management and human resources consultancy Agenda Consulting ...
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Conveyancing under spotlight as SRA unveils sweeping PII reforms
The single renewal date for professional indemnity insurance (PII) should be scrapped from 1 October next year, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has recommended in a consultation on client financial protection, published today. The regulator simultaneously announced that it will begin investigating failures in the conveyancing process early next year, and ...
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Law Society should open to non-solicitors, council member proposes
The Law Society Council will vote on a motion next week that would see barristers and legal executives given the right to seek full membership of the Society. The motion has been submitted by Derek French, Law Society Council member for Birmingham District, rather than by ...
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Bar Council visits Gulf to promote barristers
A delegation of senior barristers has begun a visit to the Gulf this week in a bid to promote the English Bar. The Bar Council group. led by chairman Nicholas Green QC (pictured) and chairman-elect Peter Lodder QC, will visit Oman, the United Arab Emirates and ...
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Lawyers switched on to technology
Two-thirds of lawyers now use a BlackBerry device for work, and three-quarters check their messages either constantly, or at least every hour, research has suggested. A survey of 100 solicitors from firms of all sizes by research company Jures, on behalf of legal publisher LexisNexis, also ...
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Paralegals seek right to advise in redundancy cases
Paralegals have called upon the government to allow them equal status with solicitors when working on compromise agreements in redundancy cases.
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Clients keep legal spending in-house
Commercial firms are competing in a static market as large clients grow their in-house legal teams rather than turn to external firms to deal with an increasing workload, research seen exclusively by the Gazette has indicated. An annual benchmarking survey of 124 heads of legal ...
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ProcureCos give bar 'whip hand'
The ProcureCo model for contracting for legal aid work will for the first time give the bar the ‘whip hand’ over solicitors, justice minister Jonathan Djanogly said last week. The minister also disclosed that he has ruled out imposing a levy on the financial services ...
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Chancery Lane to intervene in CFA case
The Law Society has been given permission to intervene in a Court of Appeal case on civil litigation funding which it claims could ensure access to justice for many clients in the wake of the government’s proposed legal aid cuts. The case concerns a challenge by ...
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EU to the rescue on legal aid?
The government could be forced into ‘a humiliating U-turn’ over plans to cut the legal aid budget, following an EU pledge to set mandatory levels of civil and criminal legal aid for member states from 2013, it was suggested last week.
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Mexican lawyers honoured with human rights award
Two Mexican lawyers have won a prestigious human rights award for obtaining a landmark judgment recognising a new type of gender-based violence known as ‘femicide’. David Peña Rodriguez and Karla Micheel Salas Ramirez received the award from the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe ...
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EU bill set to confirm UK sovereignty
The government’s EU bill will ‘place beyond doubt’ the principle of parliamentary sovereignty over EU law, minister for Europe David Lidington said last week. He told the UK Association of European Lawyers that the bill will put on a ‘statutory footing’ the principle that EU law ...
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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 ...