Last 3 months headlines – Page 1116
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Customers or clients?
Believe it or not, being chief Legal Ombudsman does not lend itself to fan mail. On the contrary, when a letter or email arrives – looking insidiously like private correspondence from a lawyer – my natural inclination is to mull over what I might have said recently in the press ...
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New code of conduct for CMCs
Claims management companies will have to agree contracts in writing with their clients before taking fees, the Ministry of Justice announced today. The MoJ’s claims management regulator published new conduct rules – coming into force from this summer – in its response to a consultation on ...
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Solicitors must comply with stringent new Civil Procedure Rules
by District Judge Harold Godwin, president of the Association of Her Majesty’s District Judges The introduction of The Civil Procedure (Amendment) Rules 2013 on 1 April heralded the start of a stringent era of court-led case management, which will likely see many cases struck out for ...
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Identity check
If a new client instructs me on the sale of a property and I have not acted for that person before, then in addition to the normal ID checks and due diligence, I can recommend asking the would-be client if they can tell me in what year they purchased and ...
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A good thing?
In the last edition of the Gazette (25 March) the Law Society announced that it had managed to secure a postponement on the abolition of the recoverability of success fees and insurance premiums in insolvency cases until 2015.
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Wrong reforms
As a junior solicitor (and non-practising barrister) it is sad that I, along with many of my colleagues, have said goodbye to publicly funded work. The law school ideal of helping those in need could not be further from the truth. In a recent care case ...
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Age diversity
I was very interested to see the report on the roundtable discussion on diversity (see 18 March), and disappointed in equal measure – although not particularly surprised – to see no mention of age diversity. When I was at law school, there was a student social ...
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A just god?
Richard Dawkins would make short work of Jonathan Goldsmith’s musings on religion and science (25 March), ruthlessly dismissing the idea that justice exists beyond us as an ‘eternal lamp’. If science is the ultimate explanation, then justice, exactly like law, is a rapidly changing artificial human construct, determined like everything ...
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Pupils in the dock as law comes to life
Imagine the scene: fresh-faced school kids, brows furrowed, wrestling with definitions such as: ‘Appropriation: any assumption by a person of the rights of an owner amounts to an appropriation, and this includes, where he has come by the property (innocently or not) without stealing it, any later assumption of a ...
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Wednesbury shocker
Spring snow prevented Obiter from realising an ambition to visit Wednesbury, home of the eponymous test of a public body’s reasonableness, during a visit to the West Midlands the other week. However, at the annual weekend school run by Lawyers in Local Government we did bump into a genuine Wednesbury ...
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Immigration
Deportation – Decision to deport – Claimant being regarded as high-risk terrorist Othman (aka Abu Qatada) v Secretary of State for the Home Department: Court of Appeal, Civil Division: 27 March 2013 ...
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Judicial review
Public authority – Claimant religious organisation seeking to place advert bearing anti-gay message on London buses Core Issues Trust v Transport for London: Queen's Bench Division, Administrative Court (London): 22 March 2013 ...
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No ABSs in Scotland until ‘end of 2013’
Alternative business structures will not be introduced in Scotland until the end of the year at the earliest. The Scottish government wants more time to review the Law Society of Scotland’s application to be an approved regulator. The Society – the only ...
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MoJ unveils tendering plans for criminal defence
Defendants will lose the right to choose their lawyer and instead be allocated a representative, under government plans to introduce price-competitive tendering (PCT) for criminal defence services. Details of the proposed PCT model were published for consultation today, together with a raft of other measures designed ...
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Take on the Winslow case
In Terence Rattigan’s play The Winslow Boy, the most famous barrister of the day is engaged to clear the name of 14-year old Ronnie Winslow, accused of the theft of a five-shilling postal order. The stain on young Winslow’s character is lifted – but at some cost to his family. ...
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SRA Handbook in force
The seventh version of the Solicitors Regulation Authority Handbook comes in to force this week. Changes include outcomes dealing with the ban on referral fees in personal injury cases, and the removal of rules put forward in the first phase of the SRA’s Red Tape Initiative. ...
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Judiciary urges caution on contempt
Proceedings against publishers and jury members should be the very ‘last measure’ taken where contempt of court is alleged, the judiciary has said in its response to a law commission consultation. The response’s authors, Lord Justice Treacy and Mr Justice Tugendhat, said that any measure likely ...
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Criminal legal aid: what now?
The government’s latest consultation paper on legal aid makes grim reading for any solicitor who undertakes criminal defence work and, indeed, for many providers of other legally aided work. The headlines have majored on the Daily Mail-pleasing stories of taking much prison work out ...
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Memory lane
The Law Society’s Gazette, April 1953Legal Aid Scheme In my view it is high time that the Society pressed for the introduction of a new system of remuneration for solicitors in contentious matters. The existing scales are out of date and bear no relation either to ...
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Expert witness ruling a blow to children, Society warns
Children involved in family law cases will face extra uncertainty following a High Court ruling on the funding of expert witnesses, the Law Society has warned. The Society reacted with disappointment to the ruling that the Legal Aid Agency, formerly the Legal Services Commission (LSC), is ...