Last 3 months headlines – Page 1161
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Putting money before ethics
Granted there is much to criticise in the investment/business model of partnership but those are commercial problems that can be fixed privately. If they cannot, you walk, simple as that. Reading, however, that James Caan now owns a law firm, I ruefully thought back to 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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Grayling renews human rights assault after Qatada release
Justice secretary Chris Grayling has used the Abu Qatada deportation debacle to strengthen his call for reform of European human rights laws. The radical Islamic cleric was released on bail this week after a special immigration appeals commission allowed his appeal against deportation to Jordan, ...
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Local government merger plan
Lawyers in Local Government is likely to be the name of a new body combining Solicitors in Local Government, which represents 4,000 local government lawyers in England and Wales, and the Association of Council Secretaries and Solicitors. The merger move coincides with the Law Society’s ...
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Claims management regulation ‘won't be transferred’
The government will resist calls to transfer claims management regulation to another independent regulator. Justice minister Helen Grant (pictured) told a House of Commons debate last week that fundamental change was wrong at a time when reforms were tackling bad practice by the sector. ...
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Kent firm Cripps brings in property expert
Expertise from the property industry is to guide expansion at Kent firm Cripps Harries Hall, the latest law firm to announce the appointment of a high-profile non-executive consultant. Christopher Digby-Bell (pictured), a director and general counsel at property investment business Palmer Capital, has been appointed ...
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Litigants in person ‘need more support’
A former aviation director who represented himself in court has called for the government and legal profession to do more to help self-represented people. Peter Elliott said he was ‘utterly frightened’ when he first walked into Manchester’s high court four years ago and was reduced to ...
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Society mental health scheme to become mandatory
Membership of the Law Society’s mental health accreditation scheme will be mandatory for legal aid practitioners from 2014, it emerged this week. A provision is to be added to the legal aid contract under which only people with accreditation will be entitled to provide legally ...
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Video in courts ‘not being used’
Time is running out for the practice of leaving video suites in courts, the official in charge of computerising the justice system said last week. Paul Shipley, IT director at HM Courts & Tribunals Service, said the Ministry of Justice is demanding that ‘cashable savings’ ...
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Scots protest over legal aid cuts
Lawyers in Scotland demonstrated outside the Holyrood parliament this week, threatening to strike in protest over changes to the country’s legal aid system. The Civil Justice Council and Criminal Legal Assistance bill, currently before the parliament, proposes that defendants with a disposable income of £68 or ...
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How To: use social media
The normally sure-footed John Lewis Partnership demonstrated the risks of ‘engaging’ with shoppers through Twitter in September, when its upmarket grocer, Waitrose, urged people to complete the Tweet: ‘I shop at Waitrose because...’. What came back in this open forum was not the anticipated free endorsement of its products by ...
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Crystal-ball gazing
Some large corporations employ a ‘futurologist’. During any available downtime, such professional soothsayers may consider helping out those considering a career in the law. As was clear at the Gazette’s roundtable for junior lawyers, today the profession’s new entrants are often forced to juggle hefty debts with uncertain prospects.
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Advisers must learn lessons from the Winterbourne View scandal
by Sheree Green, senior associate at Anthony Collins Solicitors On 26 October, six former members of staff at Winterbourne View Hospital convicted of offences of neglect and abuse were given custodial sentences.
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Hooper: call police over ‘corrupt’ referral fees
A former Court of Appeal judge earlier this week called for lawyers who pay or receive ‘corrupt’ referral fees to be reported to the police. Lord Justice Hooper told the bar conference that the growth of referral fees, which ‘corruptly’ influence the choice of trial advocate, is the most pernicious ...
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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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Exception to enforcing foreign judgment
Boris Berezovsky was recently successful in having a £15m claim brought against him by the state-owned Russian airline, Aeroflot, dismissed by Mr Justice Floyd, who gave summary judgment in Berezovsky’s favour on 30 October ([2012] EWHC 3017 (Ch)). Addleshaw Goddard acted for Berezovsky.
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UK struggling to shake off taint of torture
There they were, side by side in Hatchards bookshop on the very day that the Supreme Court released its judgment in Rahmatullah v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. Eliza Manningham-Buller’s Reith Lectures (Securing Freedom, Profile Books) and Ian Cobain’s Cruel Britannia: a secret history of torture (Portobello) ...
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Board battered by bar broadside
Obiter notes with alarm the assertion by certain bigwigs of the bar that the lord chancellor is sympathetic to the culling of the Legal Services Board.
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Government in spectre
A lovely titbit of parliamentary idiosyncrasy from APIL’s House of Commons event last week. Romsey and Southampton North MP Caroline Nokes dropped by to hear from the claimant lobby and revealed she had just come from a meeting with a government minister. ‘He was sitting ...
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Poison pen letters
The new regulatory world of indicative behaviours, outcomes and principles may leave some solicitors longing for simpler days when they were just told what to do. Take, for example, the no-nonsense guidance in the professional code of 1974 on the acceptability – or otherwise – ...