All articles by Rachel Rothwell – Page 16
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News
A blow to EL claims
Last week, an attempt to oppose changes to health and safety law that will make it harder for employees to bring claims against their employers, failed in the House of Lords. At the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers’ annual conference this month, APIL past-president David Bott ...
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Rise in small-claims limit may be good for litigants
When it comes to the small-claims court, all the focus seems to have been on personal injury.
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Firms are getting cold feet over DBAs
A couple of weeks ago I went along to an excellent debate on damages-based agreements chaired by Michael Napier QC, and hosted by Harbour Litigation Funding and Expedite Resolution. One of the main points that came across was the extent to which the shoddy drafting of ...
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ATE rush prompts another ‘emergency’ cover product
An after-the-event insurer has introduced a new emergency insurance product to cope with the surge in demand from solicitors in the run-up to 1 April. Keystone Legal said the product would enable it to issue policies ahead of the April deadline, when the Jackson reforms ...
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ATE insurers are gearing up for 1 April
If you are an after-the-event insurer, you are probably rather busy right now. Solicitors are (metaphorically speaking) queuing outside your front door, down the street, round the corner, and in some cases halfway down the M4 to sign their clients up to policies before 1 ...
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Judges begin flexing their Jackson muscles
What with judges’ general dislike of all things costs related, and the latest announcement from the senior judiciary that new costs budgeting rules will not normally apply to disputes of a commercial nature over £2m, one could be forgiven for thinking that our friends on the bench are really not ...
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Assessing costs: a nasty shock
With the Court of Appeal’s recent judgment in Henry, much attention has focused on the new costs budgeting rules coming in this April as part of the Jackson reforms. But there is another change on its way that will also affect lawyers and costs professionals quite significantly – and its ...
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Third-party funders face tougher rules
The Association of Litigation Funders (ALF) is to bolster measures to protect clients whose litigation is funded by third-party investors. Writing in the February edition of the Gazette’s sister publication Litigation Funding, the ALF’s chair, Leslie Perrin, reveals that the body will introduce tougher rules to ...
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Judges need support over costs budgeting
By Rachel Rothwell, editor of Litigation Funding Now that we are only two months from Jackson D-Day, solicitors are waking up to the prospect of costs budgeting.
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Costs budgeting: why judges need more training
Now that we are only two months from Jackson D-Day, solicitors are waking up to the prospect of costs budgeting. Costs budgeting will require lawyers to think carefully about the likely costs of a trial at an early stage, submit budgets to the court for approval, ...
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Putting it simply: a handbook for LIPs
Last Friday, the judiciary published a special guide for ‘self-represented’ litigants to help them through the judicial process. It was a sign of the times if ever there was.
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A view from the litigant in person
A few weeks ago, I got chatting to a woman in my local pub – let’s call her Susan – who is embroiled in a legal battle in the family courts. Having spent more than £50,000 in legal fees, she is now acting as a litigant in person, and her ...
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Will post-Jackson clients need protection from lawyers?
The government is now well on its way towards introducing damages-based agreements, which will be served up to litigants from a new menu of funding options next April. It issued a draft version of its DBA regulations nearly two months ago, and after inviting comments during ...
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Litigation funding: joining the party
A few years ago, most solicitors would have had no notion of what third-party funding (TPF) was, and even fewer would have cared. But as banks become ever more reluctant to lend to law firms – and civil litigators begin turning their minds to how they will finance contingency fee ...
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Are lawyers an easy target for hackers?
At the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s conference for international legal regulators earlier this autumn, one of the most interesting sessions dealt with the ‘hot topics’ currently bothering regulators across the globe. There was quite a range: bullying within the profession is a big issue in Australia, for ...
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Judges could make ‘ill-informed’ decisions on costs, says Gloster
New costs management rules coming in next April may lead to ‘ill-informed’ decisions on legal costs by judges, a high-profile judge has warned. Mrs Justice Gloster, who was the trial judge in Boris Berezovsky’s failed claim against Roman Abramovich this summer, said that while she had ...
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Jackson ‘will fuel conflicts’
The Jackson reforms will heighten potential conflicts of interest where barristers are dealing directly with the public, experts at the bar conference warned last week. The reforms will alter the rules underpinning conditional fee agreements and introduce damages-based agreements, which will allow lawyers to take a ...
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Bar chief rebuffed over LSB closure
Calls from the bar for the disbanding of the Legal Services Board met with a cool reception from the government this week. Bar Council chair Michael Todd QC told the bar’s annual conference that the super-regulator was going ‘beyond its brief’ and creating ‘burdensome costs’. ...
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Will costs get out of kilter?
At the end of last month, the government announced what many had suspected for a while; that it is not going to introduce a ‘costs council’ of lawyers and other experts that would have been tasked with ensuring that fixed costs, and the guideline hourly rates used by courts in ...
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LSB must go now, says Bar Council chief
The barristers’ profession cranked up its pressure on the Legal Services Board this weekend as the chair of the Bar Council called for the super-regulator to be ‘disbanded'. Michael Todd QC told the bar's annual conference that the LSB was going ‘beyond its brief’, and criticised ...