All News articles – Page 1406
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News
Solicitor shot in Devizes has died
Police have confirmed that Wiltshire solicitor James Ward (pictured) has died following a shooting in his office earlier this month. The 58-year-old, principal solicitor at Morris Goddard & Ward, was shot at his desk in the firm’s Devizes office on 2 July. Wiltshire Police today confirmed ...
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Money laundering - at last, the evidence?
As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for. Something is about to happen that some have requested for a long time. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the inter-governmental body which takes the lead in the global fight against money laundering, and which is the inspiration behind ...
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Borders agency slammed for under-performance
Members of Parliament today criticised the UK Border Agency (UKBA) for failing to clear a 276,460 cases backlog - equivalent to the ‘entire population of Newcastle upon Tyne’. The backlog includes 150,000 individuals in the migration refusal pool and 3,900 foreign national prisoners who should have ...
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The incredible shrinking legal aid statistics
Worrying signs that clients could already be finding it harder to access legal advice, even before next year’s legal aid cuts come in to force, emerge from the latest annual statistics from the Legal Services Commission. The LSC’s annual report, published last week, reveals that the ...
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Society ‘dismayed’ at AML penalty stance
HM Treasury has decided to retain criminal penalties for breaches of anti-money laundering (AML) regulations and not to exempt even the smallest firms from the administrative burden of compliance. The decisions, published last week in the Treasury’s response to a consultation that began in 2009, have ...
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Deech hits back over bar tribunal ‘collapse’ claim
The chair of the Bar Standards Board (BSB) has defended the process for disciplining barristers following a claim that it is in a ‘state of collapse’ amid allegations of secrecy, maladministration and incompetence. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Lady Deech said: ‘It is totally ...
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‘Common sense’ test proposed for prosecutions
Prosecution decisions would have to be tested for ‘proportionality’ under a proposed revised Code for Crown Prosecutors published by the director of public prosecutions yesterday. The revised, ‘more succinct’, code would supplement the existing public interest test with a question about whether the likely outcome ...
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Sixth annual bar placement scheme
The Bar Council hosted its sixth annual bar placement scheme last week, in conjunction with the Social Mobility Foundation. The scheme encourages talented children to aim for the bar regardless of their social or economic background.
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Appeal to test article eight right over private property
Squatters occupying the likely site of Heathrow’s proposed third runway were yesterday given a six-week stay of eviction to appeal under article eight of the Human Rights Act, the right to home and family life. The site is privately owned and this will be the first ...
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Turn to arbitration and slash costs, town halls told
Local authorities could save 95% of the typical cost of taking cases to court by turning to specialist arbitration, according to a not-for-profit organisation providing such services. The London-based Centre for Justice said public bodies are losing up to 10% of their budgets annually in ...
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‘Bill of Rights’ consultation shows how bad laws get made
For anyone curious to see the process of rubbish ideas being turned into statutes that operate sub-optimally, I recommend reading the second consultation of the ‘Commission on a Bill of Rights’. This is not to say that Sir Hugh Lewis, the commission’s chair, is ...
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Mine's a Baileys
Still humbled by the phenomenal response to the legal cocktail competition, Obiter’s representatives on earth (the Gazette editorial team) set out to test the winning cocktails as promised.
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Barclays’ Libor fixing ‘voided’ swaps deals
Barclays’ manipulation of the London inter-bank offered rate (Libor) may have rendered tens of thousands of customer agreements that reference Libor ‘void’, according to a £12m claim against the bank. The case could open the way to claims for sums far exceeding direct losses incurred through Libor manipulation, admitted in ...
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Wheeldon should get the Buckles treatment
Just as respectable physicists once believed in the luminiferous ether, the mainstream commentariat has long been bewitched by the notion that public services are better and more efficiently run by organisations energised by the profit motive. A neoliberal article of faith for both main parties in recent years, it was ...
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MPs slam Cameron’s shared parenting plan
The chair of the commons Justice Select Committee has written to the prime minister expressing ‘great concern’ over plans to change the Children Act to promote shared parenting. In a robust letter Sir Alan Beith sets out the cross-party committee’s opposition to the government’s proposal ...
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No one cares and we will pay
As a property specialist, our firm is likely to be the one to thwart property fraud. I had not realised how little anyone else cared until I tried to report a property crime today. Through a vigilant estate agent, we found out that someone is pretending to be our client, ...
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Plans to rush cases through system are half-baked and dangerous
by Julian Young senior partner of central London firm Julian Young & Co and a solicitor-advocate We are seeing an increasing number of initiatives from ministers and civil servants to rush cases through the lower courts at breakneck speed.
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Local government: standards regime; disability payment challenge
So, farewell then, the Model Code of Conduct Order 2007. As 6 June saw the long-overdue birth of the (almost) final statutory measures to launch the new and battle-scarred standards regime, on 1 July the ancien standards régime was quietly euthanised - subject to the temporary reprieve of a few ...
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PII special: overview - sea change
Since moving to the open market in 2000, many solicitors’ firms have complained of professional indemnity insurance (PII) premium price hikes. As one anonymous lawyer put it: ‘Let’s not pretend that the insurers are some sort of benign force existing to help anyone. They are there to take premiums and ...
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Rise in NHS negligence claims expected
Claims against the NHS are likely to rise this year as cases are pushed through ahead of funding reforms, according to the new head of the NHS Litigation Authority.