Last 3 months headlines – Page 1256
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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 – ...
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Jackson ‘will fuel conflicts’
The Jackson reforms will heighten potential conflicts of interest where barristers are dealing directly with the public, experts at the bar conference warned last week. The reforms will alter the rules underpinning conditional fee agreements and introduce damages-based agreements, which will allow lawyers to take a ...
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QASA designed to ‘destroy’
The Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA) is designed to split the legal profession in order to destroy it, the chair of the Criminal Bar Association alleged. Michael Turner QC said QASA is not being introduced to protect the public from ‘rogue advocates’, but as a necessary precursor to one ...
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Libel damages
Damages – Assessment – Claimants having libellous comments made against them Cairns v Modi; KC v MGN Ltd: Court of Appeal, Civil Division (Lord Judge CJ, Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury and Mr Justice Eady): 31 October 2012 ...
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Bar builds student appeal despite drop in pupillages
The number of students applying for the bar professional training course (BPTC) soared by almost 17% last year as the number of pupillages continued to drop. The second annual ‘Bar Barometer’ report published jointly by the Bar Council and the Bar Standards Board shows that ...
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Fall guy McCann gears up for conference
There was very nearly a nasty accident at the Motor Accident Solicitors Society conference in Manchester last week. As he waited to enter the lion’s den with a speech to delegates, Zurich’s motor claims manager Derek McCann disappeared from view. There was a hushed pause as the audience wondered whether ...
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New call for ABSs complaints data
The Law Society has called on regulators to collect specific complaints data on alternative business structures after failing to persuade the government to create a separate compensation fund for ABSs. The lord chancellor is expected to remove the ‘sunset’ clause in the Legal Services Act to ...
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‘Without merit’ immigration appeals rounded on
Immigration solicitors who lodge last-minute groundless applications to prevent removals will be named and shamed and have their senior partners summoned before the court, the president of the Queen’s Bench Division has warned. Sir John Thomas said the administrative court faced an ‘ever-increasing large volume’ of ...
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BT snaps up legal software giant
Telecoms giant BT has announced its second foray into the legal services world with the £64m acquisition of a specialist supplier of law firm software. BT Retail announced this morning that it has agreed to pay £64.2m in cash for Tikit Group, which supplies financial and practice management systems to ...
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Turn-up for the books
Thinking of people or cases that changed the law reminded me of the master escaper and burglar Alfie Hinds. He was convicted of a 1953 robbery mainly on the bitterly contested evidence of chief superintendent Herbert Sparks, who claimed to have found dust in Hinds’ trouser ...
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Beware the private sector bearing gifts
Roll up, roll up for the great prison giveaway. The aim of the game is quite simple: promise the earth and the Ministry of Justice will hand you the keys. All you then need to do is shrink the workforce, slash the budget and make sure ...
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Hundreds of DLA jobs in line of fire
International firm DLA Piper has put 251 jobs at risk across the UK after launching a review of its domestic business. The firm said today it is considering the closure of its Glasgow office, the closure or divestment of its defendant insurance practice and the consolidation ...
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Marsh joins SRA’s first lay majority board
A former Law Society president is among four new members appointed to the first board of the Solicitors Regulation Authority to have a lay majority. Paul Marsh was president in 2008/09 and since then has been central to the creation of the Society’s Conveyancing Quality Scheme ...
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Will costs get out of kilter?
At the end of last month, the government announced what many had suspected for a while; that it is not going to introduce a ‘costs council’ of lawyers and other experts that would have been tasked with ensuring that fixed costs, and the guideline hourly rates used by courts in ...
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Norton Rose announces transatlantic merger
International firm Norton Rose has announced a merger deal with a US practice that will cement its place in the top 10 global firms. The firm will combine with Fulbright & Jaworski on 1 June, 2013 to form Norton Rose Fulbright. The ...
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FFW merger deal with Osborne Clarke off
Merger talks between top 40 law firms Osborne Clarke and Field Fisher Waterhouse have collapsed over ‘differences in approach’. The firms confirmed in September that talks had started over a joint venture. But in a statement today, the firms said they had ...
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Legal training system not broken - City
The City of London Law Society has criticised what it calls ‘misconceived’ assumptions underpinning the landmark review of legal education and training. In a response to the Legal Education and Training Review being conducted by the three main regulators, the group representing 15,000 City lawyers says ...