All articles by Michael Cross – Page 120
-
News
Russell Jones & Walker approved as ABS
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has cleared the Australian takeover of top-100 firm Russell Jones & Walker by licensing it as an alternative business structure (ABS), it announced today. RJW, acquired by Slater & Gordon earlier this year, is the fifth ABS firm to be ...
-
News
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 ...
-
News
Day in court
The day after press day on a weekly newspaper is a good one for editors to get out to see a bit of the real world. I spent last Thursday in Court 1, Southwark Crown court, watching the opening stages of what everyone expects to be a lengthy trial concerning ...
-
News
‘Daft’ FoI requests can be ignored
Public bodies can safely ignore requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI) for their plans to deal with zombie invasions. Graham Smith, deputy information commissioner, told the Solicitors in Local Government annual weekend school last week that ‘silly and daft’ requests would be covered by existing guidance on vexatious ...
-
News
NHS reforms ‘will mean more litigation’
The government’s reforms to the NHS in England are set to cause a wave of legal difficulties for local authorities, solicitors were warned this week. Ben Troke, partner at Midlands firm Browne Jacobson, told the Solicitors in Local Government annual weekend school that the Health and ...
-
News
Jackson warns of compulsory electronic era
Solicitors may be forced to file documents electronically and use other IT systems to support the civil litigation reforms. Lord Justice Jackson, the reforms’ architect, devoted his 13th lecture on the reforms’ implementation last week to call for an integrated courts IT system – and ...
-
News
MPs call for review of legal aid cuts
The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has added its voice to calls for an independent assessment of the impact of the government’s cuts to legal aid. In a hard-hitting report on Ministry of Justice finances, the committee said the government’s own impact assessment ‘has ...
-
News
Outrage at £2.60 wage proposal for trainees
Trainee solicitors could be paid as little as £2.60 an hour in their first year under an amendment to the Solicitors Regulation Authority's proposals for ending the minimum wage. The Law Society’s Junior Lawyers Division (JLD) today condemned the move as another step towards making the legal profession the ‘preserve ...
-
News
MPs call for audit of legal aid changes
The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee today adds its voice to calls for an independent assessment of the impact of the government's cuts to legal aid. In a hard-hitting report on Ministry of Justice finances, the committee says the government’s own impact assessment ...
-
News
Deferred prosecution could come to UK, says Alderman
Legislation to enable US-style deferred prosecutions for corporate crime may feature in the Queen’s speech on 9 May. Richard Alderman (pictured), outgoing director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), said last week that deferred prosecution - under which the authorities and a business agree a ...
-
News
Concern over new powers to prosecute cartels
Legal specialists have warned that a new anti-competition regime announced by the government today could lower the bar to prosecutions, creating the risk of miscarriages of justice. The reform, proposed by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, would merge the Competition Commission and the ...
-
News
Big bang, big crash
Broadly speaking, computer projects make three sorts of news headline. One is the ‘gee-whiz gizmo’ of fond Tomorrow’s World memory. Second is the ‘big brother’ scare story about surveillance or intrusive data-sharing.
-
News
Data delinquents and the money-go-round
You know the ritual. A laptop computer, smartphone or memory stick goes missing and, a few weeks or months later, some shamefaced public body admits that the device contained sensitive personal data. Over the past year, however, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has started getting ...
-
News
Transparency - lawyers have got off lightly
Few readers will mourn the demise of the website Solicitors from Hell. But anyone who thinks its closure will mark the end of unauthorised online scrutiny of the profession is in for a shock. I'm not talking about the certainty that some rogue will sooner or ...
-
News
Human rights test case call for sharia law
A ‘parallel’ system of justice based on Islamic law should face a test case under the Human Rights Act, a group campaigning against religious laws said this week. The One Law for All Campaign called for a case to be initiated to determine whether Muslim arbitration tribunals and sharia councils ...
-
News
Tributes paid to solicitor-judge Henry Hodge
The lord chief justice has led tributes to Sir Henry Hodge, one of the first solicitors to become a High Court judge, who died last week aged 65. Lord Judge said that Hodge had been ‘an outstanding president of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, a ...
-
News
Judicial hurdles hamper recovery of looted assets, says transparency group
International efforts to block the looting of poor countries by corrupt governments are hampered by the lack of a single body to combat money laundering in the UK, according to a government-sponsored study. Combating money laundering and recovering looted gains, by Transparency International, calls on the government to fund asset-recovery ...
-
News
Family courts in ‘unseemly gallop’ to open to press
The opening of family courts to the press is ‘moving at an unseemly gallop’, a leading high court judge in the family division said last week. Mr Justice Hedley told an emergency meeting at the Law Society that the new policy – announced by justice secretary Jack Straw late last ...
-
News
Database survey warns of legal risks
People who take the government to the European Court of Human Rights for mishandling personal data should not have to risk paying the state’s costs if they lose, a landmark survey of government IT programmes said this week. Database State, published by the Joseph Rowntree ...
-
News
Journalists in family courts
At a rough guess, of the 150-odd people who packed out Chancery Lane’s reading room last night to discuss the Ministry of Justice’s plans to admit journalists into family courts, 149 think it a bad idea. And the one who is in principle in favour (me) has strong reservations about ...