Last 3 months headlines – Page 1253
-
News
Fiji hits back at scathing report
Fiji’s attorney general has launched a personal attack on the author of a report which claimed to expose a serious deterioration in the rule of law in the country. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum (pictured), the second most powerful member of Fiji’s government, described the report as a ‘joke’ ...
-
News
Flexible working 'crucial for women lawyers'
Almost all women lawyers believe that flexible working practices are key to women winning senior roles in law firms, an international survey suggests. Some 85% of respondents to the survey, commissioned by LexisNexis and the Law Society, said that the level of commitment required to reach ...
-
News
The public element of the legal economy is already ‘running hot’
Justice secretary Kenneth Clarke opined this week that he did not know ‘why’ legal aid was so expensive. Considering ‘if’ it is expensive would be a more pertinent point. By most measures in a western economy the healthy balance between private and public is about ...
-
News
Lawyers must engage with Occupy issues
by Melanie Strickland, a solicitor and Occupy London supporter Remember To Kill a Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch? The white lawyer who defends an innocent black man facing a rape charge, which he will inevitably be convicted of because it’s the deep south and the jury is racist? ...
-
News
LASPO suffers three more defeats in Lords
The government lost three more votes on its planned legal aid reforms in the House of Lords yesterday, but narrowly staved off an amendment that would have kept public funding for all clinical negligence cases. In the second day of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment ...
-
News
Educate, don’t mandate: Jackson on mediation
Lord Justice Jackson has called for a ‘serious campaign’ to teach lawyers and judges the benefits of mediation to settle disputes. The architect of the civil litigation reforms told a conference today that he is still a keen advocate of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) as a ...
-
News
Solicitors need to wise up to contingency fees
One of the big uncertainties of the Jackson reforms is how big damages-based agreements (‘DBAs’, or contingency fees as they are more commonly known) are going to be. For the first time outside of employment cases, from April 2013 lawyers will be able to take ...
-
News
Ombudsman stance plays into hands of the Co-op
If I had a pound for every client/customer debate I’d heard, I’d probably have… £10 or so. Most of the time, I retreat before the argument gets going, ignoring this irrelevant and diversionary issue. Frankly, it matters not what the bill payer is called, just that ...
-
News
Fee structure frozen to 2013
Regulators today confirmed they will not change next year’s fee structure for solicitors. However the actual level of fees will not be set until later this year. The existing settings for practising fees were set at a board meeting of the Solicitors Regulation Authority last ...
-
News
Reprieve for specialist support service
The Specialist Support Provider Service (SSPS) has received a stay of execution after the Legal Services Commission agreed to extend current contracts for three months while it consults on ending the scheme.
-
News
Bring back Green forms
Those of us of a certain age will remember 'Green' forms. They covered legal advice and meant that virtually anyone could get advice on anything, from any solicitor, if they could not pay for it. You filled in the client’s means on the front and you had something called a ...
-
News
Treat clients as customers or you’re doomed, says Ombudsman
Law firms will not survive if they continue to resist consumer demands for fairer pricing, the Legal Ombudsman has warned. A report published today states that up to a quarter of the 90,000 annual complaints relate to costs, where a client has felt overcharged, confused or been surprised at the ...
-
News
SRA seeks online feedback
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has promised a ‘comprehensive review’ of problems encountered in its first year of online renewals.
-
News
Public procurement jumps onto the agenda
Public procurement is not a topic that rates highly when lawyers meet and chat. However, our members have been pressing us to look at the proposed new directive on public procurement, and so we are hurriedly doing so.
-
News
LSB ponders making immigration advice a reserved activity
Regulators have ‘inadequate understanding’ of the immigration advice market and don’t know if lawyers provide a good service, according to a review by the Legal Services Board (LSB). A discussion paper published by the LSB reveals that the authority is looking at whether immigration advice and ...
-
News
Clarke: ‘We’re taking legal aid away from lawyers’
The government’s legal aid cuts are aimed at lawyers, the justice secretary Kenneth Clarke said today, as he rejected the Law Society’s claims that they will harm access to justice for the disadvantaged. Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Clarke said: ‘We’re not taking legal aid ...
-
News
Opponents score hat-trick on legal aid votes
The government lost all three votes in the Lords last night over proposed amendments to its legal aid bill, making concessions on the evidence needed to prove domestic violence and on powers to bring cases back into the scope of legal aid. In a series of ...
-
News
Interpreting the interpreters’ strike
‘Know your own strength!’ the historian and intellectual E.P. Thompson told the biggest central London demonstration for years, on 25 October 1992. But we’ll never know whether the 150,000 who marched that day did know it, since they were protesting against the Major government’s emasculation of Britain’s coalmining industry.
-
News
Blagging and the DPA - is it time to make offences imprisonable?
Despite it being almost 10 years since the start of Operation Motorman, and the subsequent furore which lead to the closure of the News of the World, it is still not possible for a person found guilty of illegally obtaining and disclosing personal information to be imprisoned for that offence. ...
-
News
Survey shows hundreds of code of conduct breaches
Regulators have discovered hundreds of potential breaches of the new code of conduct during visits to law firms. The Solicitors Regulation Authority says it found a lack of understanding of the code during its survey of 200 firms carried out before the new code’s release in ...