All News articles – Page 1267
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‘Don’t ditch quality,’ says Desmond Hudson
Law Society chief executive Desmond Hudson has warned firms to avoid a ‘race to the bottom’ as they seek to survive and prosper in a tough market.
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MoJ plans crackdown on ‘so-called’ experts
Experts whose evidence is ‘not up to scratch’ will be driven out of the family courts by reforms announced today by the Ministry of Justice. It has opened a nine-week consultation on new national standards designed to raise the quality of experts in family courts ...
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Traffic courts to be set up
Dedicated traffic courts will be established to deal with low-level road traffic offences and free up the courts to deal with more ‘serious and contested’ cases, the government announced today. The new courts follow a pilot in nine areas. The Ministry of Justice said it is ...
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Litigants in person; oral evidence; and costs management
Sir Alan Ward in Wright v Michael Wright Supplies Ltd [2013] EWCA Civ 234, a case which concerned two litigants in person (LIPs), opened his judgment by warning the reader that ‘this judgment will make depressing reading’. The case highlighted the difficulties increasingly encountered by the judiciary at all levels ...
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Legal education move by embattled Co-op
The Co-operative Group’s legal services arm is to set up a ‘learning academy’ later this year to give legal training to aspiring lawyers who cannot afford university.
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Jurors ‘confused’ on new media contempt
Groundbreaking research on juries has revealed that most jurors feel they are not given enough guidance on conducting deliberations, while almost a quarter misunderstand the rules on internet use during trials. Among jurors who misunderstand the contempt rules, 16% believe they cannot use the internet at ...
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Combination punchlines
Obiter’s application for a research grant to study the impact of combined firm names on perceptions of the profession is still languishing in the regulator’s inbox, but in the meantime here are a few contributions from our readers. Jonathan Davidson of Liverpool firm QualitySolicitors Jackson ...
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Coalition reforms threaten to jeopardise English law’s peerless status
Winston Churchill described Russia as a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, and the fall of Soviet communism has hardly invalidated that description. We refer you to the fast-growing state-run global news service RT (Russia Today). For some ‘in the west’, RT is a sort of anti-Fox News, ...
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Law Society Yacht Club
The Law Society Yacht Club has been inactive for a number of years. However, some members are hoping to revive it and to that end we are holding a general meeting on 5 June at El Vinos, 47 Fleet Street, London. The meeting starts at 6.45pm. If any members require ...
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Immigration clampdown ‘danger’ to legal sector
The future prosperity of Britain’s world-leading law firms could be jeopardised by headline-grabbing immigration reforms, the Law Society has warned.
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Civil strife
With the proposed strike action in respect of criminal legal aid reforms seemingly an agreed and positive form of protest, it saddens me that similar steps were not taken in advance of the cuts made to civil legal aid.
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Job centred
This week I was talking to a solicitor friend in another practice whose senior partner retired. On his departure, my friend’s colleague said: ‘On qualifying as a solicitor I joined a profession; on retiring as a solicitor I am leaving a job.’ Says it all doesn’t it? ...
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Foreign case influx at commercial court
Foreign litigants are increasingly dominating the Commercial Court of England and Wales, research on cases over the past five years has found. The study Who uses the Commercial Court?, by the Portland communications firm, reviewed all 705 judgments from the court between March 2008 and ...
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Government ‘ignoring’ calls for further RTA review
The government’s adviser on RTA claims has warned that ministers’ failure to heed his advice could lead to bad behaviour being incentivised. Professor Paul Fenn said today that the government had not acted on three key recommendations from last year’s review of the RTA Portal. ...
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Legal reforms: call for consistency
I listened with particular interest to justice secretary Chris Grayling’s interview on the Today programme about the new reforms of judicial review, which are aimed at making sure only genuine cases receive a hearing. The interviewer John Humphrys quite rightly compared the new changes to a ‘no win, no fee’ ...
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Judicial tension over costs budgeting
The final report on the costs budgeting pilot, which was published last week, gives an interesting insight into a battle going on within the judiciary. As is known, the Commercial Court managed to win itself an exemption from costs budgeting some time ago by convincing Lord Justice Jackson that, in ...
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Call for solicitors to use British Sign Language
Research has highlighted the need for solicitors to learn British Sign Language (BSL) so that deaf people have the same access to legal advice as their hearing counterparts. The research, published last week to coincide with Deaf Awareness Week, found that 85% of deaf people prefer ...
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Bloodsucking lawyer?
Obiter was delighted that self-professed ‘new breed of businessman’ Alex Mills survived the initial Apprentice cull last week. The founder of self-styled ‘superbrand’ Dynamo Legal kept a relatively low profile in the first two shows, despite telling one of his teammates to ‘shut up you silly shit’. ...
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Bar Council picks a former mandarin
The Bar Council has appointed former education civil servant Stephen Crowne as its chief executive to fill a post that has been vacant for two years. Crowne (pictured), 55, joins the Bar Council from IT company Cisco, where he was responsible for developing a ...
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Bringing back the death penalty
I expect the acutely distressing case of Tia Sharp to spark fresh debate about reintroducing the death penalty, and not only because her father has called for the murderer to be hanged. It can’t happen, you may say - not least because so many appalling miscarriages of justice have been ...