All News articles – Page 1286
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News
North and south
High street practices may be crumbling before our eyes and intervention costs about to cripple the profession, but the legal services scene is not all doom and gloom. Indeed, according to a report published today by lobbyists TheCityUK, legal services contributed £20.9bn to UK gross domestic ...
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News
Memory lane
The Law Society’s Gazette, March 1938Road traffic tribunals The Law Society and the Bar Council made joint representations to the Ministry of Transport that the right of audience before Road Traffic Tribunals should be restricted to members of the legal profession and, in certain cases, to ...
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News
Repeat offenders ‘should lose right to jury trial’
Serial offenders who shoplift or commit other petty offences should be denied the right to trial by jury, a senior magistrate has said. Such offenders should have their cases heard by magistrates at a cost of around £900 rather than by a jury in the Crown ...
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Hanging on the telephone
News reaches Obiter of a Midlands tug-of-war as the SRA competes with the NHS – for call centre staff. Chief executive Antony Townsend says the SRA contact centre’s decline in performance is partly due to ‘staff attrition’. The problem stems from the SRA’s move to Birmingham, leaving staff who had ...
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Prepare for the worst, SRA tells struggling firms
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has urged struggling firms to establish a contingency plan for insolvency, as the cost to the profession of interventions increases. The regulator has committed £2.2m to interventions in failed law firms in the first quarter of 2013 – almost £1m more than ...
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Edmonds: single legal regulator ‘possible within three years’
Legal Services Board chairman David Edmonds said today that a single rolled-up regulator for solicitors and barristers could be created within three years. Edmonds (pictured) told the House of Commons justice committee that the current framework of multiple regulators for different areas of the legal profession ...
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News
Ministry doublespeak
The embarrassing court interpreter outsourcing saga continues. Courts minister Helen Grant repeats the same old mantra of ‘a dramatic improvement in the interpreter contract’. Who says, exactly? The Ministry of Justice has in all conscience been asked this often enough. When its responses are shorn ...
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Inter-firm initiative to promote diversity
Firms need to work together to achieve ‘true change’ in the legal profession’s approach to diversity, according to the co-chairs of a new inter-firm initiative that launches this week. NOTICED has been set up by eight City firms to help make the profession more accessible and ...
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NewsRoundtable: diversity in the law
It is not enought to pay lip service to diversity when progress is so slow
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News
Two decades of greed
Amid all the doom and gloom of Jackson et al, perhaps the best thing that has happened to our profession in recent years is the government’s collaboration with the insurance industry orchestrating the complete collapse of the personal injury sector. With headlines suggesting ‘shock’, and announcing redundancies and closures of ...
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News
Poll predicts cull of north-west firms
Almost a fifth of law firm managing partners in north-west England are considering closing down their firm, according to a survey published today. The poll of 300 firm leaders by Liverpool firm O’Connors found the vast majority of respondents believed that planned changes to civil ...
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News
Family courts cuts will create ‘perfect storm’
Lawyers have voiced concern about plans to cut the number of judges and courts dealing with family cases in central London at a time when increasing numbers of litigants in person are expected to put greater strain on the service. The family justice system is working ...
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Why I quit the Lib Dems over secret courts
by Jo Shaw, executive director of Rosa, the UK women’s fund Last November, the new president of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, gave a lecture entitled: ‘No Judgment, No Justice’.
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News
Spotlight on the European courts
It’s time to look again at the European courts in Luxembourg. I shall start with the particular, two recent and interesting cases affecting lawyers, and move to the general, the courts’ record in relation to efficiency and the appointment of judges.
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News
Does Henry costs ruling undermine Jackson?
It was an interesting experience to have achieved success in the Court of Appeal for the appellant in Sylvia Henry v News Group Newspapers Limited ([2013] EWCA Civ 19), only for virtually every commentator in the costs world to pour derision on the judgment. Job well done, some might say. ...
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News
Maintaining public confidence is tough for the judiciary
Having good judgement is one thing that the judiciary should be good at. But deciding cases is not nearly as difficult for judges as maintaining public confidence in the judiciary. And that requires considerable sensitivity to the public mood.
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News
Separate representation vote condemned
The Council of Mortgage Lenders today accused Scottish solicitors of protectionism after they voted for separate representation for buyers and lenders in all conveyancing transactions. CML director general Paul Smee said: ‘It is disappointing that a measure which is so blatantly against consumer interests and ...
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News
Risk and Compliance conference
The Law Society has unveiled a new consulting service to help members meet their regulatory obligations. Launched at the Society’s annual Risk and Compliance conference, the service aims to provide clarity and reassurance to law firms, in particular through guidance to newly appointed compliance officers. ...