All News articles – Page 1771
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News
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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SharePoint can provide firms with high-end tech for low-end cash
There is a software company that owns solicitors’ desktops. It has the lion’s share of their company email too, and now it wants the rest of their IT business. Microsoft is a brand that needs little introduction, but it is making inroads into areas of law firm IT which were ...
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Chancery Lane steps in to help run migrant lawyer programmes
The Law Society is to help law firms run internship and secondment programmes that were threatened by new immigration rules by launching a scheme for migrant lawyers under Tier 5 (T5) of the points-based system (PBS). As the overarching body for the scheme, the Society will ...
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Radical reforms mooted in Jackson civil justice review
Radical reform of civil justice is on the agenda in the wake of Lord Justice Jackson’s preliminary report on costs. Greater use of fixed costs, an end to recoverability, a conditional legal aid fund (CLAF), a crackdown on referral fees and changes to the cost-shifting rule ...
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Closing the gap
I write in response to the comments made by Desmond Browne QC, the chairman of the Bar Council, about the impact of fees on black and minority ethnic (BME) and female lawyers (see [2009] Gazette, 30 April, 3).
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Collaborative regulation is required for the corporate sector
Regulation in the City of London has hardly been out of the headlines for some months – most notably in relation to financial regulation, but also in relation to the legal sector. One of the SRA’s key tasks over the next few months is to ensure that we have the ...
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Jackson proposes Commercial Court cost reforms
Costs rules for high-value complex commercial cases could be amended after the judge in charge of a wide-ranging review of civil litigation costs opened the door for reforms. Despite opposition from the Commercial Court Users Committee (CCUC), which is carrying out its own review of ...
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Law Society warning over Registry’s early completion plan
Land Registry plans to streamline the completion process will increase solicitors’ costs and make conveyancing less efficient, the Law Society has warned. The new ‘early completion’ practice applies where an application for a discharge of whole has been received along with other applications, but ...
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Hunt condemns unregulated legal services providers
The peer tasked by Chancery Lane with reviewing legal regulation has hit out at what he described as the ‘great unwashed’ – unregulated advisers who provide services that solicitors ‘are much better qualified to provide’. Lord Hunt of Wirral was speaking in Manchester ...
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Council replaces legal post with head of corporate governance
A county council is replacing the role of head of legal and democratic services with a head of corporate governance as part of a series of measures to make £1.4m in efficiency savings. The move, by Northamptonshire County Council, is likely to attract widespread interest ...
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Counting the costs
It is hard to know where to start with Lord Justice Jackson’s gargantuan preliminary report on civil litigation costs. If nothing else, it is as comprehensive a review of the current problems as one could hope to have.
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QualitySolicitors demonstrate outside Royal Courts of Justice
QualitySolicitors.com, the legal marketing brand, marked its launch this week with a symbolic demonstration outside the Royal Courts of Justice against the prospect of supermarkets offering legal services – so called ‘Tesco law’. Participants shouted ‘Say no to Tesco law’ and handed out cans of ...