All News articles – Page 1640
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News
What about firms that can’t afford to promote social mobility?
Accustomed as I am to receiving gloomy news about legal aid and vulnerable people being denied access to justice, a press release heralding a rare piece of good news brightened my inbox this week.
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Firms see boom in high-value litigation
A quarter of litigation disputes involve claims of more than £3m, and legal costs exceed £500,000 in 10% of cases, a survey of the heads of litigation at the UK’s top 200 law firms has revealed. The research, commissioned by Harbour Litigation Funding, showed that commercial ...
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News
Handling launch of legal directories
Today sees the publication of the 2010 Legal 500. Reputations and egos will be bolstered or dented and questions will be raised: ‘Why is such-and-such still ranked above us, when we all know that we are better?’
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Barristers offer ‘lifeline’ to criminal solicitors
Barristers’ chambers could provide a ‘lifeline’ to small criminal law firms, Bar Council chairman Nick Green QC has told the Gazette. ...
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LSC extends family contracts
The Legal Services Commission has agreed to extend the family legal aid contracts for a month, as the Law Society won an application for an expedited hearing of its judicial review at a hearing last week. At a directions hearing at the High Court on Friday, ...
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LSC extends family contracts
The Legal Services Commission has agreed to extend the family legal aid contracts for a month, as the Law Society won an application for an expedited hearing of its judicial review last week. At a directions hearing at the High Court on Friday, the court granted ...
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News
The struggle over the European Law Institute
Prepare yourself for a battle of similarly sounding initials. This is a story of how ELIA has been struggling with EUI, and how they have then decided to make common cause to be able to carve out the spoils of the battle between themselves, and so decide who else should ...
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News
Rules on ABS discussions unlikely to be relaxed
The Solicitors Regulation Authority is unlikely to relax its rules on allowing firms to enter into deals with other businesses in advance of the licensing of alternative business structures, a paper prepared by the regulator has indicated. The paper, which will be discussed by the SRA ...
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SRA steps up ARP enforcement action
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has visited 88 firms in the assigned risks pool (ARP) since July, as part of its tougher enforcement strategy to clamp down on ‘financially unstable’ firms in the pool. The regulator announced a new enforcement regime in July designed to address the ...
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News
The SRA must amend the Code of Conduct or law firms will close
This autumn the media will be replete with stories about the number of small firms of solicitors who have ceased to practise. A recurrent theme will be the lack of competition between those firms who remain, and an absence of choice for the consumer. There are three reasons for my ...
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Should corporations be bound by human rights treaties?
Human rights treaties bind states, not big business. And yet some multinational corporations are virtually states in themselves.
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Lloyds Banking Group axes 2,500 firms from conveyancing panel
About 2,500 firms have been axed from Lloyds Banking Group’s conveyancing panel in its recent cull, the Law Society has estimated. Over the last month the group, which includes Lloyds TSB, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Birmingham Midshires, has reviewed its panel membership to remove firms ...
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Ralli pursues group action for harassment against London firm
National firm Ralli is seeking to pursue a group action for harassment against London firm ACS Law in relation to the handling of file-sharing cases. Ralli has called for individuals to contact the firm if they have received what it claims are ‘bullying’ letters from ACS ...
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News
New legal ombudsman Adam Sampson gives his first interview
Adam Sampson is the first to acknowledge that his new job as legal ombudsman is potentially a poisoned chalice. One of the main catalysts of the Legal Services Act (LSA), which brought his organisation into being, was (as he puts it) ‘the woeful record on complaints-handling [of] the Legal Complaints ...
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Consumer challenges to bank charges and loan agreements
I have this recurring image of an enormous office populated by eye-shaded clerks sitting at narrow desks, poring through every word, sentence and paragraph of current consumer legislation, looking for some infinitesimal sign of weakness, some feeble link in the chain of rules and regulations.
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Trying to make sense of the legal aid tender
Before In the Loop there was Yes Minister, the latter contrasting with the former in airing only the mildest of profanities. One sprang to mind when considering the family legal aid tender. ‘Minister, if you must do this damn silly thing,’ the mandarin Sir Humphrey Appleby advises the hapless Jim ...
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LSC needs to explain allocation of work
In defence of its decisions affecting family practitioners, the Legal Services Commission states that it will commission the same level of help as last year. However, in the low-volume categories, it is clear that the LSC has deliberately reduced the numbers of matter starts nationally, to the detriment of the ...
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News
Lack of awareness on mental health
In his letter of 8 July, Hugh Barrett of the Legal Services Commission referred to 'procurement area', ‘client access’, ‘proper advice provision’ and ‘client demand’. Regrettably, this shows a lack of awareness of the type of work in which mental health lawyers are involved.
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News
Frustrated Lawyers R Us. Plan ‘B’ mutiny?
‘The sun is out... the sky is blue... there’s not a cloud... to spoil the view... but it’s raining... (doodle doodle doom)... raining in my heart.’
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Criminal record certificates have blighted lives
Enhanced criminal record certificates (see 'Tainted records') were brought in after the Ian Huntley murder cases to protect ‘children and vulnerable adults’. Commendable though this may be, what does not seem to have been envisaged by our politicians was that the lives of numerous innocent people would be blighted. Here ...