Memory lane

Gazette, 23 September 2013

LSB ‘served its purpose’

The Bar Standards Board and Bar Council have added their voices to calls for the Legal Services Board to be abolished. In its submission to the Ministry of Justice’s call for evidence on legal services regulation the BSB said the super-regulator had served its purpose in ‘kick-starting change’, but that process ‘can and will now continue without it’.

25 September 2003

The human side to IT

The idea that the conveyancing process will be markedly improved in some way once e-conveyancing is introduced has taken hold outside the profession. The truth is that e-conveyancing is unlikely to make the experience of buying a house measurably less stressful. The profession should stop pretending that it will.

22 December 1993

Call to end hearsay rule

The rule of evidence which prevents one person testifying in court to the truth of what he or she has been told by another person should be abolished, according to the Law Commission. The so-called ‘hearsay’ rule has been criticised as the most confusing of the rules of evidence.

21 September 1983

Encroachment on solicitors’ services

If the profession were more commercially orientated, surely we should be, by now, operating as estate agents as well as conveyancers, and, by giving the public a combined service, overall costs to the public would be reduced to the benefit of all concerned.

19 September 1973

Trespassers will be protected

Various explanations have from time to time been advanced for the exclusion of trespassers from the common law duty of care which others on entering the land are, in principle, owed by the occupier. English law’s traditional tenderness towards property rights would favour the maximum deterrence of trespassers by holding out to them no expectation of redress.