All News articles – Page 1733
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News
New guidance for child care and supervision cases
The Ministry of Justice is drawing up new guidelines to help local authority lawyers tackle problems faced during child care cases. The Gazette has learned that new guidance is intended to make the Public Law Outline (PLO), introduced in April last year, more effective and ...
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LSB consults on regulation of new business structures
The Legal Services Board today stressed its determination to sanction alternative business structures by mid-2011, as it launched a discussion paper on how they will be regulated. The board said it will directly license ABSs if the approved regulators do not seek to become licensing authorities. ...
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Who’s calling the regulation shots now? The Legal Services Board
In setting out its views on the regulation of alternative business structures (ABSs) yesterday, the Legal Services Board signalled its willingness to override approved regulators if they don’t get their act together quickly.
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Bids for nuclear development sites, mining rights and property sales
Going nuclear: Magic circle firm Freshfields advised energy company E.ON on its successful bid for nuclear development sites in Oldbury and Wylfa. E.ON, alongside joint venture partner RWE, acquired the land at a Nuclear Decommissioning Authority auction, where three sites were sold for ...
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Best value tendering will drive firms out of business, say lawyers
Criminal practitioners have slammed the Legal Services Commission’s ‘reckless’ plans to test best value tendering, saying they will force many firms in the pilot areas out of business. The LSC is consulting on proposals to test the new method of commissioning services in police stations and ...
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Don’t complain that you haven’t been warned
Let’s be honest, no one likes to receive complaints, though some businesses like to burnish their consumer-friendly credentials by pretending that they do. What matters though, ultimately, is how you deal with them.
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QC appointment review rejects proposals for radical change
The former head of the Queen’s Counsel selection panel has rejected Law Society proposals that would have increased the number of solicitors eligible to apply. In a report published last week, Sir Duncan Nichol said that widening access to the current award ‘would run a serious ...
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Home working – the antidote to swine flu?
Does it have to take a pandemic or a disaster to make more of home working? Swine flu is a scary thing. No one wants to take any chances with it and some employers are imposing an unofficial quarantine on employees who have recently returned from Mexico.
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Jumping ahead
Guy Barnett, managing partner of Midlands firm Blakemores, won the show jumping Welsh Masters Championship 2009 – despite being on his second string horse, a Danish Holsteiner called Aragon (pictured). Apparently his first choice, Joli Coeur, suffered an ‘unlucky rub’ in an earlier round. Barnett, appropriately, specialises in equine law.
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France sets out agenda for OLC
Improving consumer confidence in the legal profession will be high on the agenda of the first chair of the Office for Legal Complaints, Elizabeth France, as work starts on how the organisation will be run. ‘Change is needed to improve confidence in the system,’ France ...
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Bar considers action on ‘threat’ posed by solicitor-advocates
The Bar Council has set up a working group to tackle what it calls unfair competition from solicitor-advocates for Crown Court work.
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Brought to account
Obiter, who blushes to reclaim a receipted taxi fare, has watched with awed fascination the Daily Telegraph’s exposure of how MPs have worked parliament’s expenses regime. Justice ministers are among those in the spotlight. Justice secretary Jack Straw, ...
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Law Society of Scotland 60th anniversary conference: Susskind fires private equity warning
Private equity firms are stepping up their interest in English legal practices as they search for lucrative investment opportunities in a difficult market, according to Professor Richard Susskind, author of The End of Lawyers? However, the legal services futurologist warned that law firm owners hoping to ...
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FSA says it will target City professionals in insider dealing fight
City professionals are a priority target for the Financial Services Authority in its battle against insider dealing, the watchdog said this week. The FSA has begun insider dealing prosecutions against two lawyers who had worked in the London offices of US law firms. According to court papers, Andrew Rimmington, formerly ...
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More management speak, anyone?
This week I met up with an experienced entrepreneur and business man, a fellow who had started his own company some years ago and was clearly successful and making money; nothing to do with law. We were talking about business generally and got into profit ratios, business in hand (we ...
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Susskind, Mayson and Hodgart urge firms to plan for the future
If I were a lawyer faced with planning the future of my business at the same time as carrying out my day job, I think I’d feel exhausted, bewildered and not a little terrified.
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Sentencing
Imprisonment for public protection – Indecent photographs of children – Risk of re-offending R v Robert Lwellyn Hicks: CA (Crim Div) (Lord Justice Thomas, Mr Justice Blake, Mr Justice Burnett): 21 April 2009 ...
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Movers and shakers
Staff from the Manchester office of national firm Simpson Millar are setting out once again to prove that big is beautiful – if it not necessarily fast. They are donning sumo suits to wobble along the tarmac in the 10k Bupa Great Manchester Run on 17 May, to raise £2,000 ...
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A misunderstanding
One of the pitfalls of editorial control over letters is that sometimes the nub is removed so that the printed remnants are misunderstood. That is what happened to my letter that you printed on 17 April. In the version I sent to you I said, in relation to the letter ...
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SOCA ‘motoring’ on money laundering prevention
A solicitor figured among 67 criminals charged with money laundering following investigations by the Serious Organised Crime Agency last year, according to the agency’s annual report, published today. Stuart Creggy, former magistrate and senior partner at Mayfair law firm Talbot Creggy, pleaded guilty to a charge ...