All News articles – Page 1644
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News
Consumer panel calls for competence test for lawyers
Lawyers should undergo five-yearly competence testing and there should be peer review of the advice they provide to clients, the chairwoman of the Legal Services Consumer Panel has said. Dianne Hayter said continuing professional development was an insufficient check of quality, and she would like to see a more formal ...
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Rules breaches and professional misconduct – where to draw a line?
Time was, not very long ago, when a visitor to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal would be presented with a diet of thefts from client account, serious Accounts Rules breaches, or solicitors who for one reason or another could no longer run their practices. Today, the same visitor might well see ...
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Blundering on
Following last week’s ‘final’ episode of the popular dictation blunders series, soft-hearted old Obiter has caved in to pleas for just one more instalment. Here are a few more amusing leaps of logic made by legal secretaries. Mike Thomson, director at Arnold Thomson in Towcester, Northamptonshire, recalls: ‘Years ago when ...
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Turning a blind eye to EastEnders
Obiter is pleased to note that nobody spotted the frankly shocking error in last week’s issue. It was of course Archie, not Alfie, Mitchell who was murdered by that nasty Stacey Slater. Clearly members of the profession have far better things to do ...
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‘Tesco law’ will put an end to hourly billing, says Lord Neuberger
‘Tesco law’ will put an end to hourly billing and lead to ‘fixed price deals’ for litigation, the master of the rolls Lord Neuberger predicted last week. Speaking at the Personal Injuries Bar Association conference, Neuberger said that the Legal Services Act 2007 would do much ...
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Memo to self: must do better
A recent review of the Crown Prosecution Service in London rated its standard of performance ‘poor’ in 12 of the 32 London boroughs. So grievous were the failings outlined in the report by HM CPS Inspectorate, that it concluded defendants in the capital were more likely to walk free because ...
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Expansion of barristers’ role following relaxation of bar rules
The Legal Services Board has approved a relaxation in the bar rules that will allow barristers to take advantage of the Legal Services Act 2007. Following the LSB’s approval of the Bar Standards Boards’ applications to relax the bar’s Code of Conduct, barristers will now be ...
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EC attacks claim that legal professional privilege is a fundamental right
The European Commission has argued that any claim that legal professional privilege is a fundamental right under EU law is ‘superficial’. In the Akzo Nobel appeal hearing at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in February, the commission also argued that in-house lawyers could not be ...
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Most asylum seekers wrongly denied funded representation
Nearly 80% of asylum seekers are being wrongly refused publicly funded legal representation, according to a study published today by Devon Law Centre. Since July 2007, the Devon centre has had referred to it 75 asylum cases that had been refused controlled legal representation on the ...
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Probate: another disputed will relating to a farm
There seems no end to the flood of disputed wills relating to farms. The most recent is Key v Key [2010] EWHC 408 (Ch).
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Solicitors should compete with the bar at all levels, including the judiciary
By District Judge Monty Trent, who sits at the Mayor’s and City of London Court. He is the new president of the Association of Her Majesty’s District Judges I threw away my business cards, diaries and timesheets and waved good riddance to the telephones on my ...
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Grieve slams Whitehall plans for reforming criminal legal aid market
The shadow justice secretary has dismissed the government’s proposals for reforming the criminal legal aid market as ‘pre-election posturing’. Dominic Grieve QC said the plans outlined last week by justice secretary Jack Straw were ‘woefully inadequate to tackle the deep problems in the way legal aid ...
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Bar offers legal aid ‘olive branch’ on criminal fee proposals
The Bar Council has offered the government an ‘olive branch’ to avoid judicial review proceedings if it withdraws the current criminal fee proposals and negotiates a way forward. In February, the Bar Council and Criminal Bar Association launched judicial review proceedings in relation to two consultations ...
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Scotland’s high street solicitors are on the march against ‘Tesco law’
The government wants to open up the legal market and give consumers more choice by lifting restrictions that prevent solicitors from working in business structures that include non-lawyers. Sounds familiar? Not when I tell you that the government’s plans were almost derailed last week by high ...
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Friendly advice
Mark Stephens, of law firm Finers Stephens Innocent, said that Davenport Lyons’ methodology for handling illegal file-sharing cases conforms to industry best practice, and has been adopted in the Digital Economy Bill currently going through parliament (See ‘File-sharing "bully tactics"’, [2010] Gazette, 11 March, 4)’.
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SRA issues advice on Quinn administration
The Solicitors Regulation Authority today advised 2,911 law firms to sit tight and take no action after Irish insurer Quinn Insurance, which provides their solicitors' professional indemnity insurance (PII), was forced into administration yesterday.
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Quinn administration – what now for its insured law firms?
It’s just not getting any easier for solicitors when it comes to professional indemnity insurance. After two consecutive years of renewals pain, many small firms are once again burdened with uncertainty following yesterday’s bad news about Irish insurer Quinn Insurance.
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Whitehall to consult lawyers over move to cut fees in libel actions
The government has agreed to consult media lawyers on its controversial proposals to cut success fees in libel actions. In a House of Lords debate on a draft order that will reduce the success fees paid to lawyers who win defamation actions from 100% to 10% ...
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Shamed into action
Joshua Rozenberg’s view that there is ‘nothing to be gained by an arrest of someone who is never going to be prosecuted’ may be good legal analysis but it lacks political sense (see [2010] Gazette, 18 March, 8).
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Newspaper sales, Volvo acquisition and lottery numbers
Paper chain: US firm Mayer Brown advised publisher Independent News & Media on selling the Independent, the Independent on Sunday and independent.co.uk to billionaire Alexander Lebedev’s publisher Independent Print, advised by London firm Tulloch & Co. ...