Lawyers hail Archer conviction as victory for the press

As prison food and water took the place of shepherd's pie and Krug for fallen peer Jeffrey Archer last week, among the acres of vitriolic newsprint was the odd media lawyer giving an opinion on the Old Bailey circus of the past few months.

Dan Tench of London firm Olswang, and previously one of the Daily Star's legal team, gave evidence for the Crown during the trial of Lord Archer and his co-defendant Ted Francis.

In The Guardian (23 July), he wrote of how 'the Archer verdict indicates clearly the value and importance of a free press to a society and a judiciary weary of journalistic excesses'.Describing the 'amazing tale' which unfolded during the trial, Mr Tench maintained that 'the evidence on which trial and conviction were based came to light only due to determined and effective journalism', namely the News of the World sting, which caught Archer on tape admitting that he asked Francis to provide him with a fake alibi.

As for the twelve good men and true who sat through the murky revelations of court 8, doubt was raised in The Guardian (18 July) as to their - and all juries' - accurate representation of society.

Ivor Gaber wrote of his own jury experience that 'one is regarded by friends and colleagues as mildly eccentric for not having sought to avoid jury service in the first place', as 'there is a range of other professional groups who appear to regard it almost as a duty to escape service'.

He called for jury duty to be made 'compulsory, not just on paper but in reality', describing the make-up of his jury as 'not reflecting a full cross-section of society - missing were those from the bottom, excluded because they had avoided putting themselves on the electoral roll, and those at the top who seem to have opted out of full participation in civil society.'Courts were understandably close to Lord Woolf's heart this week, as he 'delivered a warning of the calamitous consequences of another minister taking over the Court Service' or, as the headline put it more succinctly, 'Hands off courts, says Woolf' (The Times, 19 July).Lord Woolf's speech to several hundred judges at their annual dinner came after Lord Irvine fought off an attempt by David Blunkett to run the courts, and 'dealt a blow to any ministerial ambitions to create a Ministry of Justice that separates the courts from the Lord Chancellor'.Another bad week for beleaguered Claims Direct, which even broadsheets like The Observer now describes as 'the ambulance-chasing compensation firm' (22 July).

Observer staff had obviously had a bad experience with the company, as the business section carried not one but two unfavourable stories - the front page told of a 'DTI probe into Claims Direct crisis', describing how officials from the Department of Trade and Industry and the Financial Services Authority 'are focusing on huge losses at Claims Direct after it was forced to hand over 16.6 million to its underwriters'.

Inside, the attack continued, listing the company's 'dreadful publicity, declining customers, damaging court rulings, stiff competition from bigger firms' and asking whether 'it may now be too late for the company to heal its wounds'.

Finally, politics' loss is the Bar's gain.

The Observer reported how former Tory MP Jerry Hayes has returned to practising as a criminal barrister, but his success rate may leave room for improvement (22 July).

When asked how many of his murder clients had been acquitted, he replied sagely: 'Being an ambitious barrister is like being an ambitious surgeon - you don't necessarily have the highest success rate.'Victoria MacCallum