News – Page 209
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News
Legal insurance should not confuse clients
If there are two words guaranteed to send any audience to sleep in an instant, they are these: Annual Report. By God, they are dull - I should know, I have written enough of the damn things. You know that very few people are going to read them but you ...
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Court lists and performance data to go online
Court lists and data on individual courts’ performance are to be made available online under plans expected to be published by the government today. A ‘right to data’ white paper from the Cabinet Office will also set out a timetable for publishing judges’ sentencing remarks online, ahead of their planned ...
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Avoiding conveyancing complaints
By the end of this article, at least in draft form, I fully expect a page full of red squiggles, erroneously identifying the noun ‘conveyancing’ as a misspelling. I have no idea why Word fails to recognise it, given its widespread and generally quite prolific use in legal circles. Perhaps ...
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Law Society responds to training review
Bottlenecks in the legal training system are inevitable so long as there are more aspiring entrants to the profession than the market can employ, the Law Society points out in its first formal response to the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR). The response is broadly in favour of the ...
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We need to make Ombudsman scheme fairer
Five years on from the arrival of the 2007 Legal Services Act we are still waiting for the ‘Big Bang’. What has come into existence seems less an entirely new universe, with a primordial cloud of traditional legal service providers accelerating away, transforming into clusters of one-stop-shop commercial enterprise (as ...
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Biggest dissatisfaction is with lawyers' costs
The older I get, the more I feel uncomfortable about the binary nature of our discourse. OK - a pretentious sentence, even by my standards. What do I mean?
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SRA seeks online feedback
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has promised a ‘comprehensive review’ of problems encountered in its first year of online renewals.
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Looking again at the rules
It is embarrassing how far, despite all your efforts to suppress them, your teenage obsessions come back to haunt you. Not a problem if your adolescent self showed any semblance of cool. But nerdy classicist is not exactly the image I want to cultivate.
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Deadline looms for online PC renewal
More than one-third of solicitors had yet to start renewing their practising certificates online through the mySRA website by Tuesday of this week, the Solicitors Regulation Authority said. The deadline for the first batch of registrations is Monday (13 February).
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SRA sorry for online delays
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has apologised for further delays to online renewals of practising certificates as it starts to clear a backlog of applications. The SRA’s new mySRA system, which replaces paper forms and cheques, has been the subject of widespread criticism in the profession.
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Managing the implications of ABSs
As Birmingham is our home, we have paid tribute to the city by naming some of our meeting rooms after its famous landmarks. One of them is named after Spaghetti Junction, a Medusa’s head of highways. It can take you where you need to go, but it is a long ...
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Barristers plan escrow scheme for holding client money
The bar is looking into a scheme to allow barristers to hold client money through proxies, the incoming head of the bar said in his inaugural speech last night.
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Ombudsman can also exonerate
There has been a lot of discussion about the Legal Ombudsman’s recent announcement on publishing the names of lawyers who have given poor service to their clients. The LeO was keen to emphasise that this applies to only a small proportion of lawyers. Inevitably some ...
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Lawyers could avoid complaints by addressing simple quality issues
A year since we launched - and I suppose we have to accept that it is now officially the end of the beginning. Frankly, it is a bit of a shock to realise that we have been up and running for that length of time. It comes as an even ...
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Tap on the shoulder
We note with interest the article on judicial appointments, including the list of forthcoming vacancies and the statement by the chairman of the Judicial Appointments Commission that his job is to make the process of selecting judges transparent and fair, so that the very best person is appointed to the ...
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LeO dealing with lawyers who don't engage
Nearly a year into the life of the Legal Ombudsman and we have seen thousands of cases. These cases are not quite as we thought they would be when we started - nothing in our modelling prepared us for family law overtaking conveyancing as the most complained about area of ...
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Naming and shaming firms well supported but fraught with difficulties
One of the unexpected difficulties in doing the press and publicity around the recent publication of our annual report was the issue of how we brought the bare statistics alive by giving real examples of our work. For the annual report itself that was easy – we simply used the ...
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Failing to investigate complaints can cost thousands
Our business is complaints. Yet I suspect that I was not the only one who spent a fair amount of time poring over the picture revealed by the Legal Services Board’s research into the way lawyers deal with complaints. To ...
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When should the ombudsman involve the SRA?
As a new creation and as a lay organisation, rather than one already embedded in the minds of lawyers, LeO has always considered it important to try to break down the barriers between us and the profession. So one of the things we have tried ...