All News articles – Page 1711
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News
Unemployment rate among solicitors climbs by 400%
The number of unemployed solicitors on benefits has quadrupled during the recession to more than 1,800, according to an analysis of official statistics by the Conservative Party reported in today’s Daily Telegraph. Along with architects, surveyors and vets, solicitors comprise one of the professional groups to ...
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Law Society to advise students about the risks of a legal career
The Law Society is to step up its campaign to warn students of the risks and challenges faced in pursuing a legal career. Expanding the Society’s information campaign is one of a number of proposals being considered by the education and training committee to address the ...
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Law Society threatens legal action over OLC jobs
The Law Society has threatened the government and the new solicitor complaints-handling body with legal action following their decision not to automatically reassign staff from the Legal Complaints Service (LCS) to the new Office for Legal Complaints (OLC). The functions of the LCS are to be ...
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Solicitors dismayed over chancellor's legal aid budget cuts
Solicitors reacted with dismay last week to further planned cuts in the £2bn annual legal aid budget outlined in chancellor Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report. The chancellor included plans by 2012/13 to make ‘£360m of savings in the criminal justice system by improving case management, putting underperforming ...
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What is the best way to combat legal aid cuts?
By now many of you will be as inured to the howls of outrage from the profession over legal aid cuts as you are to the cuts themselves. Both are becoming an almost weekly, even daily, occurrence, it saddens one to report.
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Another brickbat in the Wall
The government certainly got a bashing in Lord Justice Wall’s recent speech to the Association of Lawyers for Children. But he also raised an impressively bushy eyebrow at the media. Wall (pictured) has given his wholehearted backing to president of the family division Mark Potter’s hard-hitting speeches on the problems ...
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How will the SRA apply ‘principles-based regulation’ to legal services?
‘Principles-based regulation means moving away from reliance on detailed prescriptive rules and relying more on high-level principles to set the standards by which regulated firms must conduct business.’ So said Lord Hunt in his report on legal services regulation, which advocated such a switch. The potential ...
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Solicitors ‘to profit’ from instructing barristers following BSB rule changes
Solicitors will for the first time be able to profit from instructing barristers following rule changes agreed last month by the Bar Standards Board (BSB), a legal businessman has said. Peter Rouse, director of online barristers’ directory Bar Select, said the new rules on how barristers ...
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City firms failing to support solicitors who want to become judges
Concern is mounting over City firms’ failure to support solicitors who want to become judges, Law Society chief executive Des Hudson was expected to tell the Law Society Council this week. In his monthly report, Hudson also suggests that a ‘similar message’ might emerge from a ...
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Chancery Lane hails scrapping of best value tendering pilots
The Law Society has welcomed the Ministry of Justice’s decision to ask the Legal Services Commission not to proceed with its planned pilots for best value tendering (BVT).
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Book sales, climate change funds and hotel developments
Energy boost: Allen & Overy advised a consortium of six banks on creating the Marguerite Fund, an energy, climate change and infrastructure fund for EU member states. The banks contributed €100m (£90m) each, with the fund seeking to raise €1.5bn (£1.35bn) by mid-2011.
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Branching out
Christmas trees, like pretty much everything else, have always been subject to the vagaries of fashion. In the 1980s, it was all coloured lights and patterned baubles (chez Obiter, at any rate), then came the more sophisticated white lights, non-twinkling. A few years ago the fashion was for fibreoptic trees, ...
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Law Society seeks judicial review over costs capping
The Law Society is set to seek a judicial review of the government’s move to drastically reduce the legal costs that defendants can reclaim if they are acquitted of a criminal offence. A regulation introduced by the Ministry of Justice at the end of October removed ...
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Open and shut case
So Resolution opposes the government’s plans to extend family reporting (see [2009] Gazette, 10 December, 3). The government is quite right to be extending it; the public need to know what is being done in their name.
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Law firms urged to conduct identity checks on staff
Firms are putting themselves at risk by failing to carry out basic identity checks on their staff before employing them, the chairman of the Law Society’s conveyancing and land law committee has warned. Richard Barnett said he had been made aware that many firms were not ...
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Payment into court by cheque – when is payment ‘received’?
Where a party to proceedings has been ordered by the court to make a payment into court, whether for security for costs or otherwise, it is common practice for such a payment to be made from a firm’s client account by cheque.
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More Christmas jokes
Following on from our request for funny legal cards, Obiter received this one from motoring law specialists My brief solicitors in Kent. Can you really be charged with being drunk in charge of a sleigh, Obiter wonders? And how many points will that be on Santa’s licence? ...
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Swatton Taylor Dutton and Matthew Waite & Co
In our 3 December 2009 edition, we published a letter by Peter Hughes of Hughes & Company, Tring, regarding referral fees. Mr Hughes and the Law Society Gazette are happy to make clear that the solicitors firms Swatton Taylor Dutton and Matthew Waite & Co, of Tring, have never paid ...
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Wake up and smell the coffee
I am writing in response to recent letters from solicitors who either claim or imply that because their firms don’t pay referral fees they somehow have more integrity than firms that do. Aside from failing to mention that rule 1.02 of the Code of Conduct requires us all to act ...
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Contingency fees regulation will drive lawyers out of the market
Government proposals to regulate contingency fees will drive lawyers out of the market and leave 500,000 people a year without legal representation, employment lawyers have warned. Draft regulations published this month by the Ministry of Justice propose a 25% cap on the proportion of a client’s ...