All News articles – Page 1422
-
News
System failure
I write regarding the recent announcement by the Ministry of Justice to increase the financial limit in the small-claims track from the present £5,000 limit to £10,000, diverting some 80,000 cases each year from the fast-track claims route to the small-track claims route. This is ...
-
News
Employment
Jurisdiction - Unfair dismissal Ravat v Halliburton Manufacturing and Services Ltd: Supreme Court (Lords Hope, Brown, Mance and Kerr, Lady Hale): 8 February 2012 The Supreme Court held, in dismissing ...
-
News
Foot in the door
Work experience is now seen as critical to securing a training contract, but with hundreds of students vying for every vacation scheme place and badgering firms of all sizes for work experience, how fair is the competition? In 2009, former Labour minister Alan Milburn’s Fair Access ...
-
News
Covert trip reveals rule of law ‘lost’ in Fiji
A secret fact-finding mission to Fiji has concluded that the rule of law ‘no longer operates’ in the country. The independence of the judiciary ‘cannot be relied upon’ and ‘there is no freedom of expression’, council member and Law Society Charity chair Nigel Dodds reports in Fiji: The Rule of ...
-
News
Courts martial
Royal Forces - Conduct to prejudice of good order and discipline - Mens rea - Judge holding no case to answer R v Armstrong: Courts Martial Appeal Court (Sir Anthony May (president), Griffith Williams, Mr Justice Coulson): 1 February ...
-
News
Patent court fears
Your report ‘Euro patent court "ruinous for business"' will have left readers who are not specialists in patent law uncertain as to whether the main issue is the principle of the court, its location, procedural rules, languages used, or the training of judges. Most pertinent is the quote from Philip ...
-
News
‘Cordial’ talks on HSBC panel
Law Society chief executive Desmond Hudson has met senior representatives of HSBC a month after the bank caused consternation by announcing a conveyancing panel containing only 39 solicitor firms. Despite a ‘cordial’ meeting, Hudson described the outcomes as ‘disappointing’ and said he did not expect ‘any voluntary change of approach ...
-
News
‘Control’ of documents
In the recent case of North Shore Ventures Limited v Anstead Holdings Inc [2012] EWCA Civ 11 the Court of Appeal considered the concept of 'control' of documents under Civil Procedure Rules 71.2 and 31. The rules ...
-
News
Quality control
It is unfortunate that the Law Society limits its criticism of the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates to the idea that judges should evaluate advocates. Instead it should have addressed Lord Justice Moses’ suggestion in his Ebsworth lecture that it is impossible to evaluate the qualities necessary to make a ...
-
News
MoJ to consult on PI discount rate
The Ministry of Justice is to re-examine the discount rate used to calculate the amount deducted from an injured person’s compensation to account for income received from investing the damages, the Gazette has learned. The personal injury discount rate of 2.5% has not changed since 2001. ...
-
News
In cod we trust
Fish and chips taste better in Yorkshire, as any native of the county will agree (yes - Ed). Newly merged Skipton and Keighley firm AWB Charlesworth Solicitors has made the delicacy the centrepiece of a regular informal Friday lunchtime get-together with local professional contacts. According to commercial partner Umberto Vietri: ...
-
News
Captured market
In Today’s Conveyancer a Mr Pete Dockar, head of mortgages at HSBC, purports to deal with some questions about the new panel arrangements. As might be expected, the response is bland to the point of being useless, making vague and unsupported assertions about fraud. No doubt the answers given were ...
-
News
New capping regime must not cost the earth
Lord Justice Jackson’s suggestion of a fixed-cost regime is an improvement on the government’s proposals, but falls short of providing ‘copper-bottomed’ compliance with the Aarhus Convention.
-
News
Millions spent on empty court buildings
The government is spending £2.5m a year maintaining dozens of redundant courts across England and Wales, the Gazette can reveal. A reply to a freedom of information request shows 69 former court buildings remain vacant, with no imminent chance of them being sold. Justice minister Jonathan ...
-
News
Blame game
The letter from Peter Connolly hits home with this firm of solicitors, which has achieved admission to the Conveyancing Quality Scheme. We have already applied to the licensed conveyancers to join the HSBC panel, only to be told that there were no vacancies in our area.
-
News
Could you thrive in the slipstream of big brands?
We’ve yet to see what impact big money brands will have on the legal market but the general consensus seems to be that it won’t be pretty. Legal services sold like cans of beans by giant corporations with no soul or sense of duty and no ...
-
News
Troika bid to cut judicial holidays
The time-honoured tradition of two-month summer breaks for senior judges has become an unexpected frontline issue in international efforts to rescue troubled European economies, the Gazette has learned. The so-called troika, comprising the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission, has set fiscal and ...