The Law Society Gazette, 4 March 2004

Council backs referral fees

The Law Society Council last week stood firm on its decision to allow referral fees and rejected an attempt to overturn it and force a postal ballot. At the council meeting it was said that several local law societies were strongly opposed to referral fees.

Letters: E-mail mania

The use of e-mails for professional communications is readily understandable and has advanced professional development, but for what possible reason do people feel the urge to send private internal e-mails or external e-mails, to their friends and lovers?

A solution to the problem? May I suggest a greater devotion to work and a willingness to conduct their social and love lives in their own time, on their own premises, and at their own expense.

Gazette, March 1964

Newspaper commentators

There was in the December issue of the Gazette a suggestion that those found guilty of a robbery should be kept in jail until ‘a fixed proportion of the sum stolen had been repaid’. The suggestion was commented on in February in a letter from Mr James H Scott, a prisoner in Parkhurst Prison. A number of newspapers quoted Mr Scott’s letter… [quoting] the fact he was serving a 10-year sentence for his part in a theft involving £3,115. However not one of the newspapers reported that Mr Scott had stated in his letter here that the sum of £1,700 was recovered ‘wholly because of my voluntary help’.

Gazette, March 1944

Notes of the month

Lieut-Colonel Lionel Wigram, whose name appears in our Roll of Honour this month, brought to the consideration and solution of military problems those sterling qualities which had given him early and striking success as a London solicitor.

Among the first to appreciate, after Dunkirk, that the British Army was training on an outmoded system, he prepared a new one, realistic, brilliant in conception and revolutionary. Seeking first-hand experience of actual battle conditions to test and improve his technique, he went to Italy where he raised and trained a band of Italian irregulars to fight with the Eighth Army.

Utterly fearless, he was killed at their head in a night attack on a village.

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