Latest news – Page 752
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News
LSC under fire over spending
The Legal Services Commission’s ‘unlawful’ family tender cost around £1m, its legal director told the House of Commons justice committee last week. The LSC also came under fire from MPs over senior executives’ pay, after its recently published accounts showed that former chief executive Carolyn Regan ...
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Family lawyers offered ADR fee
Legal aid minister Jonathan Djanogly has proposed that family solicitors should receive £150 to provide legal help to clients who engage in mediation, to demonstrate the government’s commitment to alternative dispute resolution. Speaking at the National Family Mediation conference last week, Djanogly (pictured) announced that where ...
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Libel defence broadened to reflect internet age
The first libel case to be appealed to the Supreme Court has seen a defence dating back to Victorian times broadened to meet the needs of the internet age. In Spiller v Joseph, Lord Phillips said the defence of ‘fair comment’, which places a burden on ...
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Solicitors miss out on judicial posts
Two women and two ethnic minority lawyers were among the 13 candidates recommended for appointment to the High Court in the most recent selection round, the Judicial Appointments Commission has said. The JAC said the appointments would increase ethnic minority representation in the court to ...
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Lawyer denies ‘£1.4m theft’
A Leeds solicitor and his wife stole £1.4m from the firm where they both worked to fund a luxury lifestyle, a jury at Leeds Crown Court heard last week. Simon Morgan, 50, who was senior partner at Milners in Leeds, and his wife Ann Young-Morgan, 55, ...
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Out of court disposals warning
Too many cases are being dealt with by out of court disposals where the police are acting as prosecutor and judge, a Court of Appeal judge said last week. Giving the Roscoe lecture on criminal justice, Lord Justice Leveson pointed out that 450,000 cases were dealt ...
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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 ...