All News articles – Page 1497
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Local authority
NHS - Nursing care - Authority seeking to amend care package R (on the application of McDonald) v Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea: Supreme Court (Lords Walker, Brown, Kerr, Lady Hale, Lord Dyson SJJ): 6 July 2011 ...
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Why the SRA replaced the assigned risks pool
Protecting consumers by ensuring effective professional indemnity and compensation fund arrangements is a key objective for the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Currently, financial protection is achieved through a combination of two arrangements: compulsory professional indemnity insurance (PII) and the compensation fund.
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The English were mute at the international legal aid conference
Every couple of years, legal aid administrators from around the world meet with concerned academics. In June, they gathered in Helsinki.
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Advice for firms that find it harder to get PII cover at the right price
Market conditions have produced something of a ‘perfect storm’ around the October professional indemnity insurance (PII) renewals this year.
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LSC transfers cases from collapsed immigration advice provider
The Legal Services Commission has announced that it has begun transferring urgent files from the collapsed Immigration Advisory Service to other providers. Following a call for existing immigration contract holders to submit expressions of interest to take on IAS cases, current providers indicated they had the ...
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Ace of race
City lawyers were out in force at last week’s Standard Chartered Great City Race. The first man across the line was Chris Busaileh (pictured), trainee at Speechly Bircham, while Reed Smith’s Karen Ellison and Lawrence Graham’s Gemma Jones claimed seventh and eighth in the female rankings. ...
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Sharon Shoesmith case: accountability and fairness
Power politics can be brutal to those perceived as prejudicial. A former Archbishop of Canterbury found this out to his cost. For in December 1170, Thomas Becket was murdered at Canterbury Cathedral in apparent compliance with the wishes of King Henry II, with whom he had had a series of ...
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Defamation lawyer: abuse victims need CFAs
A leading defamation lawyer has called for conditional fee agreements to be preserved to help victims of press abuse. Steven Heffer, chair of the Lawyers for Media Standards group, said individuals must be given the means to fight legal battles against media outlets that have acted ...
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ABSs at risk of criminal ownership, Law Society warns
The Law Society is pressing the Ministry of Justice to make an urgent amendment to the Legal Services Act to prevent non-lawyers with spent criminal convictions from becoming owners of alternative business structures. Society chief executive Desmond Hudson has written to justice secretary Kenneth Clarke urging ...
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Auditors warn MoJ about legal aid reforms
The National Audit Office (pictured) warned the government that its legal aid reforms would threaten the sustainability of law firms before the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill was published. The news comes after the Gazette reported last week that the Legal Services Commission ...
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Anger over £600m in unpaid court fines
The government was accused of ‘economic illiteracy’ this week, as it emerged that the amount owed in outstanding court fines has risen to more than £600m in the past year, while the number of enforcement officers employed to collect them was slashed by 12%. Solicitors expressed ...
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PII special: what law firms need to know to negotiate the 2011 renewal round
The decision to phase out the assigned risks pool (ARP) during the 2011 and 2012 renewals, leading to its abolition in 2013, has added significant anxiety to the already tumultuous market for professional indemnity insurance (PII). This transitional period will see the introduction of joint liability ...
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Solicitor linked to drug dealer jailed
Legal practitioners have been warned not to turn a blind eye to criminality after a solicitor with links to a drug dealer was jailed for 16 months. James Thorburn-Muirhead was sentenced last month to 16 months in prison after abusing his professional posititon. ...
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Should we have the right to know a partner’s criminal past?
If I want to buy a car I can see the history of everyone that has owned it. If I am buying a house I can request a surveyor’s report and check every last detail before I commit to signing the deeds. And yet, in choosing ...
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Is the power of general counsel over-estimated?
Are law firms right to focus so much of their effort on relationships with general counsel? The question seems semi-heretical to me. For 10 years in-house lawyers were the main audience I wrote for, and I feel as though I have watched the sector grow in influence and respect, shaping ...
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Regulator clamps down on claims management companies
The regulator of claims management companies has reported a massive rise in the number of businesses refused authorisation. The Claims Management Regulation Unit warned there would be ‘no let-up’ in the coming year after seeing enforcement measures against firms leap from 35 in 2009/10 to 349 ...
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Better deal for interns proposed
A best practice code urging law firms to pay work experience interns at least the minimum wage and to recruit them from a broader social range was published yesterday by the Gateways to the Professions Collaborative Forum (GPCF), of which the Legal Services Board (LSB) is a member. ...
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Law Commission reveals new areas for reform
Reviewing the law of contempt, European contract law and financial provision on divorce are among the 14 projects that the Law Commission has revealed it will look into over the next three years. The Commission has published its eleventh programme of law reform projects, selected from ...
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A&O opens in Morocco
Magic circle firm Allen & Overy has announced its first move into Africa with an office opening in Casablanca. The firm is looking to build on a number of recent deals in the continent, focusing on the region’s emerging markets. The new ...
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Commons committee targets human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) should take a ‘more robust’ position on human rights abuses across the entire Middle East, including countries such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain where the UK has close commercial ties, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has said in a report published today. ...