All News articles – Page 1612
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News
Where there’s a will
Your recent article, Rise in number of intestacy disputes, highlighted two interesting issues: hard times encourage people to contest inheritances; and intestacies offer more opportunities for such disputes to take place. My summary of this state of affairs is that necessity and greed are powerful motivators of human behaviour, and ...
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Government proposes 50% sentence cut for guilty pleas
Defendants who plead guilty at the earliest stage could receive a 50% reduction in their sentence, under government proposals outlined today in a green paper on the sentencing and rehabilitation of offenders. The plan is designed to tackle the problem that the paper calls ‘one of ...
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Academics warn against restricting qualifying law degrees
Proposals to tighten the regulation of collaborative arrangements between law schools in the UK and overseas are ‘unfortunate’ in an increasingly global market, and will encourage box-ticking rather than an evaluative approach, academics have warned. Collaborative arrangements for Qualifying Law Degrees (QLD) allow the delivery of ...
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Why are insurers still dissatisfied with PII reform?
It strikes me as odd that the Association of British Insurers (ABI) isn’t happy with the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s professional indemnity insurance (PII) reform proposals. If implemented, insurance companies will be getting many of the concessions they’ve been after for years. The ABI says that the ...
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Corporate social responsibility and community engagement
Some while ago I attended a meeting addressed by a Pro Bono officer. We were advised that the government would be pleased to think that the profession had demonstrated its community spirit by making good the shortcomings in legal aid provision by offering services free of charge through a pro ...
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News
Firms tighten spending on support staff and training
Law firms are controlling costs in the economic downturn by increasing the ratio of fee-earners to support staff and by spending less on learning and development, a survey has revealed. The survey of 47 medium to large firms by management and human resources consultancy Agenda Consulting ...
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Recent cases of ‘voluntary erasure’ raise important issues
Should a doctor who is the subject of a current fitness to practise complaint before the General Medical Council (GMC) be permitted to retire from the medical register on the grounds of ill health, and thereby avoid a public fitness to practise hearing?
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Time to review the discount rate in personal injury claims
When assessing future pecuniary loss in personal injury claims, the multiplicand/multiplier approach is often adopted. An important factor in determining multipliers is the net rate of return (discount rate) the claimant might expect to receive from a reasonably prudent investment of the lump sum compensation.
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Conveyancing under spotlight as SRA unveils sweeping PII reforms
The single renewal date for professional indemnity insurance (PII) should be scrapped from 1 October next year, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has recommended in a consultation on client financial protection, published today. The regulator simultaneously announced that it will begin investigating failures in the conveyancing process early next year, and ...
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Law Society should open to non-solicitors, council member proposes
The Law Society Council will vote on a motion next week that would see barristers and legal executives given the right to seek full membership of the Society. The motion has been submitted by Derek French, Law Society Council member for Birmingham District, rather than by ...
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Divorce, patents and crime
Our little local difficulties in Europe do not mean that work is not continuing on the many substantive changes that are taking place at European level in the justice area. How to keep up with them all? (Read this, that’s how …)
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Paralegals seek right to advise in redundancy cases
Paralegals have called upon the government to allow them equal status with solicitors when working on compromise agreements in redundancy cases.
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Bar Council visits Gulf to promote barristers
A delegation of senior barristers has begun a visit to the Gulf this week in a bid to promote the English Bar. The Bar Council group. led by chairman Nicholas Green QC (pictured) and chairman-elect Peter Lodder QC, will visit Oman, the United Arab Emirates and ...
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Lawyers will have mixed reaction to US’s leaked diplomatic cables
The latest documents released by the WikiLeaks website are cables from diplomats, not lawyers, but many lawyers will empathise with the argument that policymakers should be able to rely on candid advice remaining private – just as advice to their own clients should attract privilege. ...
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Lawyers switched on to technology
Two-thirds of lawyers now use a BlackBerry device for work, and three-quarters check their messages either constantly, or at least every hour, research has suggested. A survey of 100 solicitors from firms of all sizes by research company Jures, on behalf of legal publisher LexisNexis, also ...
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Be realistic about legal aid cuts
I do not think we can fault the reasoning behind the legal aid cuts, which largely preserve funding for the essential areas of human rights. We should be realistic and admit that some areas of law are not priorities, and one wonders why they were ever included in the scheme ...
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Regulator sets out guidance on pre-emptive ABS discussions
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has issued new guidance setting out what is permitted in firms’ negotiations with potential investors ahead of the licensing of alternative business structures (ABSs) in October next year. The guidance stresses that non-lawyer individuals or businesses are currently prohibited from having any ...
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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 ...
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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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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 ...