Press lynch Woolf for spreading 'dangerous thinking'

Last week's effort by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, to clarify his sentencing guidelines for burglary did not necessarily have the effect he desired.

Rather than explain that the recommendation for a community sentence for first or second-time offenders was just a starting point, so far as The Express was concerned, Lord Woolf had given criminals a licence to 'carry on burgling' (15 January).

It cried: 'Fury as top judge won't jail raiders.'

The Daily Mail took the line that home secretary David Blunkett had issued 'an unprecedented rebuke' to Lord Woolf for 'spreading "dangerous thinking"'.

The basis for this was Mr Blunkett's response to Lord Woolf's clarification.

The paper reported Mr Blunkett saying: 'I believed that the Lord Chief Justice would want to clarify the initial announcement on the grounds it had been misinterpreted.

The signals were not just mixed but very dangerous.

I'm very glad he's done just that.'

But Lord Woolf could find a crumb of comfort in the support of The Independent, which in an editorial said he deserved a fair hearing.

'Few judicial pronouncements have been subject to such gross distortion and misreporting as the recent remarks by Lord Woolf,' it said.

The problem is not the cure, but the cause, the paper insisted, saying it was for Mr Blunkett and his colleagues to get to grips with crime and think again about how it could be brought under control.

'That is why we are failing,' it concluded.

Elsewhere, The Financial Times this week advised businesses to be wary of solicitors claiming to specialise in their sectors (20 January).

'Never before, it seems, have businesses had so much industry expertise to call,' it noted.

One unnamed City partner was sceptical.

'They shamelessly market themselves as experts in different industries depending on the latest business trends,' he said of his competitors.

'When they realised they could make a fortune out of the sports industry, there were suddenly hundreds of sports lawyers, claiming a specialism on the back of a single client.'

The paper said most buyers of legal services are unimpressed with multi-disciplinary groups drawn from across a firm's different practice areas, as 'usually only one or two partners provide the in-depth expertise'.

But for those who can sort the wheat from the chaff, and find genuine industry groups that have been operating for some time, the article concluded, instructing them 'should achieve practical and economic efficiencies in the long run'.

The battle to buy Safeway looks like good news for everyone, not least business journalists and lawyers.

The two came together in The Independent last week to consider the competition implications of the various bids (15 January).

'Most agreed that it was local market share that will decide who emerges as the victor, rather than who tables the highest bid,' the paper reported, before concluding a lengthy article with the less than surprising kiss-off that 'whatever happens, the lawyers stand to make a bundle'.

The Sunday Times also noted that 'the bid battle is a boon for City lawyers', not least because of the central role of competition issues (19 January).

'Chicago contains two of the greatest songs written for a lawyer,' enthused David Pannick QC in The Times, before admitting that this is 'not a large category' (14 January).

The musical, now a film starring Richard Gere as lawyer Billy Flynn, features Flynn singing the famous 'Razzle Dazzle', which is an 'analysis of advocacy techniques'.

Mr Pannick noted drily: 'They don't teach you at bar school that the way to impress the jury is to "give 'em an act with lots of flash in it, and the reaction will be passionate".'

Later on, Flynn tapdances around legal obstacles, but Mr Pannick sagely advised advocates: 'Don't try this at home in St Albans Crown Court.'

We finish with the strangest legal action of the week.

The Health and Safety Executive is taking Birmingham radio station BRMB to court over a competition to win the 'coolest seats in town' by challenging listeners to sit on a block of dry ice for the longest time to win concert tickets (The Times, 15 January).

It led to four people being hospitalised with severe frostbite, a result which no concert featuring Victoria Beckham and Geri Halliwell could possibly justify, surely?

Neil Rose