All News articles – Page 1571
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Bunga-Bunga
Delegates at Inner Temple last week must have been wondering what they had let themselves in for when Lord Justice Moses began the annual law reform lecture.
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Building quality
As chairman of the Conveyancing Association, I am writing to lend the support of our body to the Law Society Conveyancing Quality Scheme. Members of the association, which include a significant proportion of large conveyancers, fully support and endorse all efforts to improve the legal process of conveyancing. ...
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Which PEST is bothering your firm?
It will be 2011 in a few weeks and whenever your year-end is, planning for the coming year raises some interesting questions. What factors will affect the business planning for your firm? Here’s a standard business analysis tool that seems very relevant to solicitors firms since there seems to be ...
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EU bill set to confirm UK sovereignty
The government’s EU bill will ‘place beyond doubt’ the principle of parliamentary sovereignty over EU law, minister for Europe David Lidington said last week. He told the UK Association of European Lawyers that the bill will put on a ‘statutory footing’ the principle that EU law ...
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The benefits of the Law Society’s Conveyancing Quality Scheme
The last 12 months have been very difficult for conveyancers. They have faced low volumes of transactions caused by ‘mortgage famine’, and consumer anxiety about the economy generally. This has been exacerbated by estate agents’ increasingly aggressive attitude towards referral fees.
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The inspiration behind the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law
by Professor Jeffrey Jowell QC, the inaugural director of the Bingham Centre The Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law will be formally launched at the Royal Courts of Justice on 6 December. Supreme Court president Lord Phillips will preside over a meeting addressed by ...
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'Mixed practice' warning for publicly funded barristers
Incoming Bar Council chairman Peter Lodder QC today warned publicly funded barristers to diversify or face a bleak future. Legal aid rate cuts have been ‘too numerous and too deep’ for young barristers to survive on that single source of income, he told Bar ...
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ProcureCos give bar 'whip hand'
The ProcureCo model for contracting for legal aid work will for the first time give the bar the ‘whip hand’ over solicitors, justice minister Jonathan Djanogly said last week. The minister also disclosed that he has ruled out imposing a levy on the financial services ...
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Called to the bar
The Ministry of Justice’s consultation on court closures – sorry, modernising and improving the courts – closed in September, but Obiter nonetheless hopes that his honour Anthony Bradbury’s book, Early London County Courts, is on the justice ministers’ Christmas reading lists. The ministers, Obiter knows, like to think outside the ...
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Moses backs jury questions in criminal trials
Judges should present a list of questions to jurors in criminal trials to guide them in reaching a verdict, a senior judge suggested last week. Lord Justice Moses said the move, which was recommended in Lord Justice Auld’s 2001 review of the criminal courts, would reduce ...
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Mexican lawyers honoured with human rights award
Two Mexican lawyers have won a prestigious human rights award for obtaining a landmark judgment recognising a new type of gender-based violence known as ‘femicide’. David Peña Rodriguez and Karla Micheel Salas Ramirez received the award from the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe ...
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Audit training
A law degree (or CPD) plus Legal Practice Course is insufficient preparation for practice, and so there has to be an element of practical training. At the moment there is little quality control of training contracts; if you can last the two years, then you are in. ...
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Should judges encroach upon the political arena?
‘Traditionally judges have kept their mouths shut and not entered the arena of the administration of justice or policy matters,’ noted Mr Justice Coleridge in his candid, compelling and at times caustic speech to the Association of Lawyers for Children.
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Fixed-share partner loses appeal
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has upheld an earlier ruling that a solicitor who was a fixed-share partner in a Bournemouth law firm is not entitled to seek to claim unfair dismissal from the firm, because he cannot be classed as an ‘employee’. Martin Tiffin, a former ...
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EU to the rescue on legal aid?
The government could be forced into ‘a humiliating U-turn’ over plans to cut the legal aid budget, following an EU pledge to set mandatory levels of civil and criminal legal aid for member states from 2013, it was suggested last week.
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Injustice of legal aid cuts
I observed the following incident at a north London magistrates’ court. A defendant, who was clearly mentally ill, had been charged with an offence that was contrary to section 5 of the Public Order Act. The facts were that he had been shouting at a ...
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Shopping for legal advice at QualitySolicitors: a postscript
It is slightly more than two weeks since I visited QualitySolicitors Freeman Harris in the Lewisham Shopping Centre in London. As a result of this trip, the firm has taken on one of my cases: a dispute with the police over a Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority award. That is to ...
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Personal injury ad ban appeal
The government should not rush to amend personal injury advertising rules, the chair of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said last week. In the first parliamentary debate on Lord Young’s ‘compensation culture’ report, which took place in the House of Lords last week, Lord Smith of ...
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We must not stand by and let government devastate access to justice
On 12 November I stood in a muddy field in Runnymede and listened to the great and the good, including justice secretary Ken Clarke, hail the Magna Carta as the foundation of fundamental rights and the protector of human freedom and civil rights. Chief among those rights are equality before ...
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MoJ calls for data on RTA portal abuses
Solicitors and insurers must hand over data that exposes abuses of the road traffic accident claims portal to the Ministry of Justice, a key official said last week. Kevin Westall, head of civil justice policy, procedure and customer intelligence at the MoJ, told the Motor Accident ...