All articles by Michael Cross – Page 123
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News
Law reform programme unveiled
The Lord Chancellor will be forced to update Parliament annually on plans to implement Law Commission recommendations, the commission’s chair said this week. Sir Terence Etherton told journalists the proposal was a sign of a closer working relationship between the commission and government. ...
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News
Whistle-blow code defence
A new code of practice on whistle-blowing could provide a defence for companies facing legal or regulatory penalties, one of its authors said this week. Guy Dehn, head of the charity Public Concern at Work, said that implementing the first British Standards code on arrangements ...
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News
JAC targets top firms for recruits
The Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) is targeting major law firms in its campaign to persuade more solicitors to become judges, a senior commissioner said this week. Frances Kirkham, JAC commissioner in charge of the current selection exercise for recorders, said that firms, as well as ...
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News
Watchdog may hear grievances
Citizens with grievances against public bodies will have easier access to ombudsmen under reforms to the laws governing redress proposed by the Law Commission this week. If adopted, the proposals would allow citizens to approach the Parliamentary Ombudsman on their own account instead of via ...
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News
Legal sector leads the way on cutting carbon footprint
Legal firms lead the professional services sector in investigating their carbon footprint, according to a league table published this week by an industry forum.
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News
Charity chief says law has ‘ossified’
The head of the new Charity Tribunal hopes the body will speed up the evolution of charity law to keep pace with developments in the third sector.
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News
‘End judicial shortlists’
A judicial appointment process that leaves candidates in ‘professional limbo’ while waiting for a vacancy to arise should be abolished, according to the Judicial Appointments Commission.
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News
Tarzan and the briefs
In his heyday, Michael ‘Tarzan’ Heseltine MP was renowned for finding the G-spot of the Conservative Party. This week, Lord Heseltine of Thenford seems to have worked the trick across the political spectrum. Whatever the likelihood of it being implemented, his ‘No Stone Unturned in Pursuit of Growth’ report brought ...
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News
Bring out your dead
If 200 people in England and Wales dropped dead one week from a mysterious unknown cause, you’d think our supposedly nanny state would learn about it right away.
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Feature
Could the iPad revolutionise the way law firms do business?
Like several thousand other people, Lee Ranson, managing partner at Eversheds, bought an Apple iPad on 28 May, the day it went on sale. ‘We were converts,’ he says. Unlike many proud early owners, however, he saw the much-talked-about handheld computer not as an executive toy, but as a key ...
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News
Cold called
To be honest, I knew I was asking for trouble by picking up the phone at teatime. The only calls that come through on that particular landline are from investment advisers or chaps asking for my passwords so they can fix my IT. Sure enough, when I picked up the ...
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News
Can’t stand newspapers? Then stand up for a free press
Every collector of modern quotations knows Tom Stoppard’s: ‘I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.’ Probably most of us would agree. What’s less well known is the context of the quote, perhaps because the play from which it comes, Night and Day (1978*), now ...
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NewsLord chancellor takes a constitutional in the Lords
The first question Chris Grayling had to field before the House of Lords’ formidable Constitution Committee yesterday looked like an easy toss: would he prefer to be addressed secretary of state or lord chancellor?
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News
Chilling effect
As a media legal scandal, it didn’t amount to much: no superinjunctions, celebrities or retired police horses. But my one (so far - touch wood) experience of being sued for defamation as a journalist illustrates an important shortcoming of the government’s current proposals for libel reform.
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News
Opportunities in Colombia
Colombia: isn’t it a bit dicey? Lawyers in Latin America’s fourth-largest economy and deepest-rooted democracy could be forgiven for showing irritation at the inevitable question. Invariably, the reply is ‘things have changed’.
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News
A swift and sure way to computer disaster
Here we go again. Just two years after a new government promised to break with Labour’s record of IT-based policy fiascoes, along comes a high-profile public policy reform which looks set to go down the same dismal road. The success of the revolution set out in the Swift and Sure ...
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News
Cool reaction to European patent unification
Leading intellectual property lawyers in the UK have reacted coolly to the unitary patent and unified patent court process approved by the European parliament on Tuesday. ‘No one can doubt that having a single system is, in principle, a good idea,’ said Claire Bennett, partner in international firm DLA Piper's ...
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News
Cry freedom of information
The eyes of the news media have been elsewhere, but the House of Commons justice committee has just restated an important constitutional principle: freedom of information is a good thing. A long-awaited post-legislative review of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 concludes: ‘We do not believe that there has been ...