All News articles – Page 2943
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News
Tarzan and the briefs
In his heyday, Michael ‘Tarzan’ Heseltine MP was renowned for finding the G-spot of the Conservative Party. This week, Lord Heseltine of Thenford seems to have worked the trick across the political spectrum. Whatever the likelihood of it being implemented, his ‘No Stone Unturned in Pursuit of Growth’ report brought ...
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Bring out your dead
If 200 people in England and Wales dropped dead one week from a mysterious unknown cause, you’d think our supposedly nanny state would learn about it right away.
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Cold called
To be honest, I knew I was asking for trouble by picking up the phone at teatime. The only calls that come through on that particular landline are from investment advisers or chaps asking for my passwords so they can fix my IT. Sure enough, when I picked up the ...
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Can’t stand newspapers? Then stand up for a free press
Every collector of modern quotations knows Tom Stoppard’s: ‘I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.’ Probably most of us would agree. What’s less well known is the context of the quote, perhaps because the play from which it comes, Night and Day (1978*), now ...
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Magna Carta: four of a kind
With one caveat, Obiter is delighted with the plan to bring the four surviving original copies of Magna Carta into one place to kick off the 800th anniversary year in 2015. The unification, supported by magic circle firm Linklaters, will provide a one-off chance to see the four extant copies ...
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Cashflow outlook worsening, new LMS quarterly survey shows
Cashflow problems are worsening for law firms, according to results from the Law Society’s Law Management Section (LMS) financial benchmarking quarterly. The survey, the first results of which are to be published tomorrow, found that 40% of firms were experiencing more cashflow pressures than in the previous quarter. Firms' responses ...
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My legal life: Julia Chain
I married an academic, so one of us had to be able to support the family – law seemed like a good profession. Legal education back then taught us nothing about dealing with clients – it was six months of learning by rote. What was excellent was the training. I ...
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NewsLord chancellor takes a constitutional in the Lords
The first question Chris Grayling had to field before the House of Lords’ formidable Constitution Committee yesterday looked like an easy toss: would he prefer to be addressed secretary of state or lord chancellor?
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Dishonesty reports double as solicitors 'take chances' - SRA
Reports of solicitor dishonesty have almost doubled in the past two years as economic pressures start to bite across the profession, the Solicitors Regulation Authority revealed today.
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Chilling effect
As a media legal scandal, it didn’t amount to much: no superinjunctions, celebrities or retired police horses. But my one (so far - touch wood) experience of being sued for defamation as a journalist illustrates an important shortcoming of the government’s current proposals for libel reform.
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Grayling in concession on client choice
The justice secretary has agreed to retain client choice and signalled his support for an alternative tender model proposed by the Law Society, based on a modified version of GP contracts in the NHS.
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My legal life: Christopher Murray
Both of my parents were in the medical profession but as a small child I remember listening to my mother talking about the iniquity of capital punishment – prompted by the Reginald Christie trial – and the likelihood that Timothy Evans had been wrongly hanged for a murder Christie had ...
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Trainee retention rates rise at top City firms
The proportion of trainees winning places at top firms has increased this year to an average of 83%, figures for the September intake show. Magic circle firm Slaughter and May reported the highest retention rate, 90%, offering placements to 46 trainees. Rival Clifford Chance said 80% of its 60 trainees ...
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Opportunities in Colombia
Colombia: isn’t it a bit dicey? Lawyers in Latin America’s fourth-largest economy and deepest-rooted democracy could be forgiven for showing irritation at the inevitable question. Invariably, the reply is ‘things have changed’.
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Education review comes out for ‘incremental’ reform
Legal education and training is not ‘fundamentally broken’ but is failing to ensure consistent levels of quality across the profession, a long-awaited pan-profession report says today.
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A swift and sure way to computer disaster
Here we go again. Just two years after a new government promised to break with Labour’s record of IT-based policy fiascoes, along comes a high-profile public policy reform which looks set to go down the same dismal road. The success of the revolution set out in the Swift and Sure ...
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LETR: consumer watchdog is ‘greatly disappointed’
The Legal and Education Training Review is a ‘missed opportunity’ because it fails to heed calls for a re-accreditation scheme for solicitors, the legal consumer watchdog said today.
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Contact details
Why are addresses and telephone numbers so frequently omitted from email communications (despite the plethora of disclaimers etc attached)? Why in the most elaborate websites is ‘contact us’ the hardest or last thing to find? Why is there a tendency on the part, usually of the most prestigious firms, to ...
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Fiji rule of law report found in contempt
A Methodist minister in Fiji is awaiting sentencing for contempt after he quoted a Law Society Charity report whose contents were first revealed in the Gazette. The organisation headed by the Reverend Akuila Yabaki, the Citizens’ Constitutional Forum, also faces a crippling fine for ‘scandalising the court’ after its newsletter ...
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Convention on Modern Liberty debate
The need for a British human rights act was one of the few issues of contention to surface at the nationwide Convention on Modern Liberty held last Saturday, writes Michael Cross. Dominic Grieve QC MP (pictured), shadow attorney general, said a future Conservative government would introduce such an act, which ...