All News articles – Page 1735
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News
Duty calls: the hard and sometimes demanding and thankless role of a duty solicitor
The duty solicitor I’m shadowing negotiates electronically controlled gates under the unblinking gaze of CCTV cameras. He arrives at a windowless room beneath the court, where the table and seats are bolted to the floor and there is a glass viewing port in the heavy wooden door. A guard from ...
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Chancery Lane responds to PII concerns – statement from the chief executive
The Law Society has moved to address growing disquiet among practising solicitors about the problems they have encountered renewing their professional indemnity insurance. Chancery Lane announced last month that it had written to the Association of British Insurers and individual insurers asking them for an ...
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Jackson considers raising personal injury small claims limit
Lord Justice Jackson has hinted that he might recommend increasing the small claims limit for personal injury cases if there is no deal on fast-track fixed costs, the Gazette can reveal. His last public address before going into report-writing purdah is being seen as a warning ...
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Personal injury lawyers hit by new fees for RTA claims
Claimant personal injury solicitors face a cut of up to 53% in the fees they receive under a new road traffic accident claims process agreed last week. However, the claimant groups which negotiated the deal with insurers said this will be balanced by a more streamlined ...
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The notion of a global ‘legal family’ is more than just a lazy cliche
This year, the opening of the legal year is especially significant, for it marks a new chapter in the eminent history of our profession – the Supreme Court is to open its doors for the first time. Irrespective of sporadic controversy surrounding its creation, the ...
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Cookies and the cream
Obiter has been officially outdone. For some time now the Gazette has been trying to bag an interview with our own justice secretary (yes, you, Mr Straw), only to discover that not one but two new starters at Leeds firm Schofield Sweeney are ...
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Ministry of Justice tackles ‘spiralling’ defamation legal costs
The Ministry of Justice has introduced new rules aimed at cutting ‘spiralling’ legal costs in defamation proceedings by making changes to the rules for ‘no win, no fee’ arrangements.
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Horses for courses
A friend passed me an article entitled ‘Taking the reins’, by Lucy Trevelyan, about equine law (see [2008] Gazette, 7 August, 14). As I am a life-long horsewoman (and journalist who sometimes writes for the equestrian press) I found it really interesting.
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Inspectors praise CPS Organised Crime Division
The independent inspectors of the Crown Prosecution Service have praised its specialist Organised Crime Division (OCD) for high-quality case preparation and decision-making, in a report published this week. The HM CPS Inspectorate commended the CPS’s specialist organised crime prosecutors for their availability to give pre-charge advice ...
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Solution to the insurance crisis
As someone who practises in the field of property mortgage fraud claims, it gives me no comfort to say that I foresaw that PI premiums would escalate and – coupled with the drop in conveyancing caused by the recession – create the financial crisis for solicitors reported in your front-page ...
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Insider dealing prosecution
Two former City lawyers charged with eight counts of insider dealing by the Financial Services Authority have been committed to stand trial at Southwark Crown Court. Andrew Rimmington, former partner at US firm Dorsey & Whitney, and Michael McFall, former partner at US firm McDermott Will ...
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LG Law and Practice diploma
Congratulations from the board to this year's successful candidates and prizewinners. The diploma celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2009, and several hundred solicitors have earned the highly respected "Dip. L.G." letters after their names over that time. The course lasts for nine months, counts for CPD ...
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News
Discouraging words
The headline ‘Firms "over the worst" of recession’ (see [2009] Gazette, 24 September, 1) may have been intended to be encouraging, but readers will have been struck by the extraordinary insensitivity of the wording of the report, which said that firms were ‘finally reaping the rewards of staff cuts’.
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Free Roman Polanski – now!
Doesn’t your heart go out to film director Roman Polanski? He was arrested in Switzerland last week and yet all the poor guy had done, according to the 1977 charges against him, was sodomise a 13-year-old girl and force her to engage in ‘oral copulation’.
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Memory lane
Law Society’s Gazette, October 1949 Public, commercial and overseas appointmentsGold Coast
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Let’s be practical
As a newly qualified lawyer, I note with interest that the Legal Services Policy Institute is proposing that the training contract be scrapped. Yes, it is difficult to get a training contract in the current climate and yes, it is even more difficult to secure employment after completion of training. ...
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Rhyme and reason
The Gazette caught it in the neck recently for describing conveyancing as ‘prosaic’. Suitably contrite, we issued a challenge to solicitors of a poetic bent to disprove that provocative description in verse. Martin Smith of Borehamwood has duly obliged: ...
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Valuable training
I am disappointed to read of the Legal Services Policy Institute’s suggestion that training contracts be scrapped and that students qualify immediately upon completion of the LPC (see [2009] Gazette, 24 September, 1).
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Bach rejects Society’s legal aid fee cut fears
Legal aid minister Lord Bach (pictured) has rejected Chancery Lane’s demand for an extension to the consultation period on proposed criminal legal aid cuts. He also dismissed the Law Society’s allegation that the August consultation paper Legal aid: funding reforms is ‘incoherent’ and ‘deeply flawed’. ...