All News articles – Page 1289
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News
Mid Staffs negligence ‘explosion’ predicted
NHS hospitals must brace themselves for an ‘explosion’ in medical negligence claims in the aftermath of the report into the Mid Staffordshire scandal, a leading lawyer in the sector has said. Tim Gorman, partner at clinical negligence firm Axiclaim, said last month’s publication of the Francis ...
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New rules for employment tribunals
Employment tribunals are to become the ‘last resort, not the first port of call’ after the government’s announcement today that it has accepted proposals in a fundamental review of procedure for tribunals. The proposals accepted by the government include new strike-out powers for employment tribunal judges, ...
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Independent review of ‘pre-pack’ deals
The government has announced an independent review of the controversial insolvency vehicle through which DWF recently acquired the collapsed Cobbetts while leaving creditors likely to recoup little or nothing of what they are owed. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said the review into ...
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Curse of the Tome Raiders
Help for newly ensconced COLPs and COFAs was at hand this week at franchise network HighStreetLawyer.com’s conference at Chancery Lane. One top tip came from risk manager PNCR Legal’s Tim Prior, who noted that many COLPs and COFAs are still struggling with keeping systems and policies up to date. ...
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Financial crisis will cost everyone in the end
Journalists are far too willing to bandy the term ‘crisis’ around, using it to label everything from a few cancelled trains to an Arsenal defeat. But how else to describe the impending financial troubles about to hit the legal profession? I say profession quite deliberately. So ...
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Coping with the global
Solicitors have been one of the beneficiaries and promoters of globalisation in legal services. It is not a success that could reasonably have been predicted back in the 1960s. I suppose that its causes lie in multiple factors, including: the removal of the cap on the number of partners in ...
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Society unveils consulting service
The Law Society today unveiled a new consulting service for members to support work to meet their regulatory requirements. The service aims to provide clarity and reassurance to law firms and in particular to offer guidance to newly-appointed compliance officers. ...
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Eight-week PCT consultation period looks like a fig leaf
Like striking miners in the 1980s, criminal defenders must sometimes feel they are treated as the ‘enemy within’ by government. Pointedly overlooked for their role in expediting justice after the 2011 August riots, they have now been hit by an accelerated price tendering process which bears all the hallmarks of ...
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SRA commits millions to interventions
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has already used 10% of its entire annual budget intervening in failed firms in 2013, the organisation revealed today.
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There are no short cuts when it comes to parliamentary sovereignty
Theresa May is no idol for human rights activists: home secretaries rarely are. She and Chris Grayling have caused much harrumphing by expressing their hostility to – either or both, it is not clear which – the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act. A recent article ...
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Ten-point plan for solicitors to cut claims delays
Solicitors can cut delays in processing claims at the County Court Money Claims Centre by not stapling forms together, the centre has suggested. The advice appears in a list of ways in which ‘customers’ can help the much-criticised Salford centre, which marks its first birthday ...
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Judge warns claimant firm on costs ‘manipulation’
A judge has warned law firms that courts will not tolerate attempts to change court orders for their own advantage. Mr Justice Edwards-Stuart told claimant firm Rosling King last week that it was verging on ‘contumelious’ [insulting] to produce a draft that its clients would prefer ...
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Testamentary capacity
In Hawes v Burgess [2013] EWCA Civ 74, the Court of Appeal upheld the trial judge’s finding that the deceased’s last will (which cut out her son) was invalid and that her earlier will (leaving everything equally to her three children) therefore remained unrevoked.
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Lloyds counsels calm on credit
High street firms should not fear a ‘kneejerk’ reaction from banks restricting lending in the wake of high-profile firm failures, according to a big-four bank. The collapse of Manchester firm Cobbetts in January, which followed the demise in 2010 of regional giant Halliwells, has led ...
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What's your firm called?
Anita Scott in Scarborough writes to wish London firms Teacher Stern and Butcher Burns success in their merger. ‘I was a little disappointed, however, that they did not adopt the name Stern Teacher Burns Butcher.’ With mergers increasingly à la mode, Obiter hopes to see ...
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Call to suspend Sri Lanka from Commonwealth
A report for the Bar Human Rights Committee has called for Sri Lanka to be suspended from the Commonwealth over the impeachment of the country’s chief justice. Barrister and report author Geoffrey Robertson QC said Dr Shirani Bandaranayake (pictured), Sri Lanka’s first woman judge and chief ...
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Budsworth gears up for laughs
Obiter was reminded of Roald Dahl’s The Witches last week, when a small boy is led into a room full of snarling crones and turned into a mouse. Of course no such fate awaited the Motor Accidents Solicitors Society chairman Craig Budsworth as he stepped ...
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News
Browbeaten spouses
The marital coercion defence raised by Vicky Pryce has had a long if intermittent history. It stemmed from the time when, because they often could not read and write, women were denied the benefit of clergy at assizes and so could not avoid punishment.
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SRA to relax rules on reporting breaches
The Solicitors Regulation Authority plans to drop the much-criticised requirement for compliance officers to report all non-material breaches, an executive said today. Samantha Barrass, director of supervision, risk and standards, told delegates at the Law Society's Risk and Compliance Annual Conference in London that the ...