Last 3 months headlines – Page 1123
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News
Fast-track for ‘lower-risk’ ABS applications
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has announced it will fast-track lower-risk applications for an alternative business structure licence. The authority has responded to criticism that the authorisation process takes too long with new guidance and a fresh approach to existing law firms. The ...
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NewsRoundtable: diversity in the law
It is not enought to pay lip service to diversity when progress is so slow
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News
Hanging on the telephone
News reaches Obiter of a Midlands tug-of-war as the SRA competes with the NHS – for call centre staff. Chief executive Antony Townsend says the SRA contact centre’s decline in performance is partly due to ‘staff attrition’. The problem stems from the SRA’s move to Birmingham, leaving staff who had ...
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News
Edmonds: single legal regulator ‘possible within three years’
Legal Services Board chairman David Edmonds said today that a single rolled-up regulator for solicitors and barristers could be created within three years. Edmonds (pictured) told the House of Commons justice committee that the current framework of multiple regulators for different areas of the legal profession ...
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News
Explosive allegation
Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. The words of psychedelic drug campaigner Timothy Leary (1920-96) were quoted by Bar Council chair Maura McGowan QC (pictured) at last week’s Law Society event to mark International Women’s Day. ...
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News
Career opportunities
Obiter hears that skills minister Matthew Hancock rather put his foot in it at last week’s launch of the higher apprenticeship in legal services. The minister waxed lyrical about new possibilities for non-graduate entry into the legal profession, while seemingly unaware of the Chartered Institute ...
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News
Pitch that takes spin
The Ministry of Justice press office was full of good news the other day, pitching the heart-warming story of Chris Grayling saving the family law service provided by the CAB at the Royal Courts of Justice. However the press release didn’t have space to explain ...
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News
Memory lane
The Law Society’s Gazette, March 1938Road traffic tribunals The Law Society and the Bar Council made joint representations to the Ministry of Transport that the right of audience before Road Traffic Tribunals should be restricted to members of the legal profession and, in certain cases, to ...
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News
Seeing the positives in change
Complaints allowed before we’ve even signed up the client? This can’t be true, you may cry. Well, I’m afraid it is, but behind every threat is an opportunity waiting to be seized. The news that even potential clients can now complain about you, following the ...
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News
Chancellor cheers conveyancers, as Scots vote on ‘sep rep’
Chancellor George Osborne today cheered conveyancers by announcing in his budget dramatic new measures to boost the housing market. A help-to-buy scheme is to be introduced for prospective purchasers struggling to find mortgage deposits. This will include £3.5bn for shared ...
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News
Strike disrupts courts service as another walkout is planned
Thousands of court workers across England and Wales today walked out on strike as the union began a three-month programme of action. Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union took industrial action to mark budget day after talks broke down over cuts to pay, pensions, ...
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News
Osborne imposes further £142m of cuts on MoJ
Chancellor George Osborne today imposed a further £142m of cuts on the Ministry of Justice, which will have to be implemented before the 2015 general election. The MoJ is one of the government departments required by Osborne’s budget to reduce its spending by 1% for the ...
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News
Probate work helps Co-op ABS break even in year one
Co-operative Legal Services (CLS) made a small profit in its first year as an alternative business structure on a 12.8% increase in revenue, the Co-operative Group’s financial results published today reveal. CLS, established seven years ago, became one of the first ABSs in March last year ...
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News
Insurers turn guns on compensation payments
The insurance industry’s campaign for cutting the cost of personal injury claims will not end with the banning of referral fees and the reduction of lawyers’ fixed fees in RTA Portal cases, a leading figure in the insurance industry has indicated. James Dalton, head of ...
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News
No justice for Zimbabwean campaigner
It’s almost a decade since the Gazette first reported that Zimbabwean human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa had been beaten up and thrown into jail. And now she is behind bars again. The Law Society and the International Bar Association have both called for her immediate release, ...
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News
Does Henry costs ruling undermine Jackson?
It was an interesting experience to have achieved success in the Court of Appeal for the appellant in Sylvia Henry v News Group Newspapers Limited ([2013] EWCA Civ 19), only for virtually every commentator in the costs world to pour derision on the judgment. Job well done, some might say. ...
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News
LSC to reconsider ‘hacked’ legal aid contract tender
A Birmingham solicitor who lost out on a family legal aid contract after her online application was hacked has won a legal challenge to the Legal Services Commission’s refusal to reconsider her application. The High Court heard that Rifat Mushtaq, owner of Mushtaq & Co, had ...
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News
Supreme Court holds secret hearing in Mellat case
The Supreme Court has submitted to what its president Lord Neuberger called the ‘unhappy procedure’ of becoming a secret court to consider some of an Iranian bank’s appeal concerning the validity of a 2009 order made against it by HM Treasury. The Treasury claimed that privately ...