All News articles – Page 1426
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News
What’s in a name?
There may be a very good reason why solicitors are reluctant to give their names to reporters after representing their clients in the local magistrates’ court. Reporters never write it down correctly and always get it wrong. I have never lived down a report in our ...
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Patently obvious? You’d think so
The UK is not universally loved in Europe. Just ask Engelbert Humperdinck. So the notoriously Europhile justice secretary Kenneth Clarke was in an awkward position this week in respect of the new European patents court. Chancery Lane added its voice to warnings that UK plc will miss out on up ...
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Unity is strength
Des Hudson and Avtar Bhatoa’s remarks (Hudson: bar strike would ‘damage profession’) will, regrettably, be music to Whitehall’s ears. The criminal bar does not want to strike. Over a number of years, we have lobbied and campaigned in the public interest against reforms and cuts ...
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Training woes
Susan Singleton clearly does not ‘get’ how hard it is these days to qualify and how much competition there is. I agree that persistence does usually pay off. However, with tuition fees now at £9,000 a year for a law degree, not to mention the Legal ...
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Former City partner gets three years for £1.3m fraud
A former Hogan Lovells partner has been jailed for three years after defrauding his firm of £1.3m. Christopher Grierson (pictured) was sentenced today at Southwark Crown Court after pleading guilty in March to four charges of false accounting. Grierson, who was dismissed by his firm in ...
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MoJ answers key QOCS questions
The government has answered some of the fundamental questions about how its new system for transferring the costs burden in personal injury cases will work. Under qualified one-way costs shifting, claimants are intended to be protected from defendants’ costs in most circumstances, even when they lose. ...
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Only two solicitors apply for silk round
The number of applications for silk has dropped for the third year running with only two solicitors among the 183 applicants, figures released by the independent selection panel revealed today. In 2011, there were 214 applications, compared with 251 in 2010 which was down from 275 ...
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Quiz your broker on fees, Society urges firms
The Law Society will today publish insurance guidance urging solicitors to exercise their rights and find out exactly what their broker is being paid. The 2012 PII Buyers’ Guide will help solicitors find out from their brokers all the fees and commissions they receive - as ...
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Top firms told to stop cherry-picking from Oxbridge
Law firms are still recruiting from a narrow elite pool of graduates, the government’s independent reviewer on social mobility and child poverty reports today. The Labour former minister Alan Milburn (pictured) said today that access to professions remains dominated by people from wealthy socio-economic backgrounds, ...
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First in, last out
I was sat at my desk well before 8am on a day when I had had the possibility of a holiday but it had not happened for one reason or another. This happens if you are a partner: you earmark time off but something urgent always comes up. A colleague ...
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Social mobility in the legal profession
Holes will be picked by some lawyers in Alan Milburn’s ‘progress report’ on social mobility and the professions, published today - even though he was nicer about lawyers than other professionals. As was argued with his previous findings, critics will point out that law firms cannot use their selection policy ...
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Law-making at decade low
The number of legislative changes last year fell to its lowest in almost a decade, according to figures published yesterday by Sweet & Maxwell. Data highlighted that 99% of the new laws were passed as statutory instruments, without being subjected to full parliamentary scrutiny. ...
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Law Society wary of 'secret justice' plan
Civil liberties groups today dismissed as 'spin' government claims that pre-publication changes to the Justice and Security Bill would protect the public without damaging ‘historic freedoms’ of open justice and accountability. In a concession to critics of a green paper last year, the bill scales back ...
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Call to halt referral fee ‘auctions’
A personal injury solicitor has accused insurance companies of ‘auctioning cases to the highest bidder’. John Spencer (pictured), director of Spencers Solicitors, said some insurers had conducted referral fee auctions amongst solicitors for bundles of cases. The price tag of these bundles was likely to be ...
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Is it wrong to profit from divorce litigation?
There are some intriguing developments in the financing of divorce cases at the moment. Investment in divorce litigation hit the headlines earlier in the year with the high-profile divorce of Michelle Young from her millionaire former husband Scot, described in the press as a 'fixer’ for ...
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Living in a time of perilous uncertainty
This is a piece about mood and atmosphere: how it feels to live and work in Brussels at a time of feverish speculation about the European Union’s future. It says something of the stability of the last few decades that it is the first occasion in my life that I ...
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New Society sections open to non-solicitors
The Law Society has announced that it has set up two new sections with membership open to non-solicitors. The Equality and Diversity (E&D) Section and the Family Section will both launch on 25 June. The E&D Section is open to solicitors practising ...
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News
Eric Pickles, where are these Jubilee jobsworths?
Next week the nation will unite to celebrate the fact that an elderly woman isn’t dead yet. The Queen will reach her Diamond Jubilee, and as punishment she’ll have to suffer thousands of idiot well-wishers, the BBC disappearing up her backside and a concert featuring Ed ...
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Will-writing and property firms bring ABS total to seven
Two niche firms specialising in will-writing and property respectively have become the latest two organisations to be accepted as alternative business structures (ABSs). Parchment Group, based in Buckinghamshire, and three-partner firm Plainlaw, based in Oxfordshire, had their applications confirmed this week by the Solicitors Regulation Authority ...