Last 3 months headlines – Page 1238
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Divorce mediation scheme ‘failing’
Courts are not checking whether divorcing couples have attended meetings to explore mediation and other alternatives before applying to start court proceedings, a survey has found. For the past year, parties have been required to attend mediation assessment and information meetings (MIAMs) to find out ...
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Lawyer foot soldiers of the Big Society need a state-maintained road to march on
This week chancellor George Osborne received a bloody nose from charities which estimate their finances will be hard hit by his decision to place a cap on tax relief for charitable donations. His move may or may not be right in principle. But as with ...
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Asbestos victims hit by legislation delay
The government has admitted that a 2010 act designed to help people gain compensation for industrial diseases is unlikely to be implemented until 2013. The Third Parties (Rights Against Insurers) Act was pushed through two years ago to update legislation dating from 1930. It gave claimants, ...
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Advise courts of uncooperative clients, solicitors told
Criminal solicitors should tell the court when clients fail to co-operate with them, to avoid the risk of breaching their duty to the court, the Law Society has advised. Chancery Lane has issued an updated practice note setting out the duties and burdens affecting solicitors arising ...
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Defence firms should make the move to digital working
by Peter Lewis, head of the CJS Efficiency Programme The government has committed to providing a simpler, swifter and more transparent criminal justice service and, as part of this, the core agencies of the criminal justice system (CJS) have committed to ‘going digital’.
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Why should solicitors pick up the tab?
The article by District Judge Richard Chapman was surely four days too late for the April Fool joke that I assume it was.
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Obligations first
Articles entitled ‘Some "rights" have limitations appear when a system of law espouses a doctrine of rights that has no, or at best an attenuated, concept of obligations as the correlative of rights. As Immanuel Kant explained during the Enlightenment and Onora O’Neill outlined more recently in her Reith Lectures ...
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The right address
I was interested by Ian Kinloch’s letter in which he refers to a German solicitor being addressed as Herr Doktor. I hold the Institute of Linguists diploma in French and liaised with a monolingual French notaire on behalf of a client buying a holiday home in the Dordogne. Leaving aside ...
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Greed is not good
‘New York has nothing to fear from alternative business structures’, says the Law Society president. As a solicitor who retired about 10 years ago, I wish to express my astonishment at that statement. Mr Wotton has a short memory concerning the so-called liberalisation of the ...
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Titanic undertaking
Astute readers may already have noticed that tomorrow [Saturday 14th April] is the 100th anniversary of the RMS Titanic striking an iceberg.
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Dress pass
Even in these casual days, turning up in court inappropriately attired remains the stuff of solicitors’ nightmares. Kevan Lines, of Abertillery firm Lewis & Lines, recalls a ghastly incident a couple of years ago (before the firm gave up publicly funded criminal work). ‘I was phoned by a legal adviser ...
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Moot point
Leeds University Law School’s team narrowly beat City University Law School in the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting’s annual mooting competition. In the finals, held at the Law Society, the mooting problem focused on a Court of Appeal case concerning a possible murder charge over a decision to withhold treatment ...
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ET or not ET? That is the question
When an employment lawyer dies it must be tempting for those left behind to draw upon the career of the deceased when considering an inscription for the tombstone. Some may aspire to the simple phrase: ‘He lived as he died; scandalous, vexatious and with no reasonable prospect of success.’ For ...
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Gap in the market
We are in a period of profound change. Last month saw the culmination of the ambitions of legislators to liberalise the legal market with the approval of the first SRA-licensed alternative business structures. Their introduction heralds a major restructuring of the way in which legal services will be delivered in ...
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Winner dinner
Chancery Lane commercial partner Hiscox is inviting you to enter its Law Society exclusive prize draw to win a private dinner party. The winning Society member and five guests will be treated to a four-course meal prepared by an expert chef in the winner’s home. To enter you need ...
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Sleeping beauties
Reading the report of the magistrate who was alleged to have gone to sleep during a mitigation reminds me of the late Wilfrid Fordham. He used to say: ‘A speech in mitigation gets no better the longer it goes on’. In his later years, Wilfrid was a great one for ...
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Tracking scheme aims to cut family delays
A new initiative to tackle delays in the family courts has got under way. The pilot scheme to track all public law cases issued from 2 April 2012 follows the launch of a case management system monitoring the progress of cases, recording all case management decisions, adjournments, the use of ...