Last 3 months headlines – Page 1258
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News
Quality control
It is unfortunate that the Law Society limits its criticism of the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates to the idea that judges should evaluate advocates. Instead it should have addressed Lord Justice Moses’ suggestion in his Ebsworth lecture that it is impossible to evaluate the qualities necessary to make a ...
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Patent court fears
Your report ‘Euro patent court "ruinous for business"' will have left readers who are not specialists in patent law uncertain as to whether the main issue is the principle of the court, its location, procedural rules, languages used, or the training of judges. Most pertinent is the quote from Philip ...
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The unavoidable impression is of a department which is being run on the hoof
Morale is low at the Ministry of Justice and its agencies, with staff expressing little faith in senior managers. And no wonder. In a climate of deep cuts, a bad case of administrative atrophy appears to have set in.
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Let's get more women to the top
by Fiona Woolf, a consultant at CMS Cameron McKenna This year, the Law Society will welcome its fourth woman president. As of 2010, 45.8% of solicitors with practising certificates were women - a figure that has nearly doubled in 10 years.
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Covert trip reveals rule of law ‘lost’ in Fiji
A secret fact-finding mission to Fiji has concluded that the rule of law ‘no longer operates’ in the country. The independence of the judiciary ‘cannot be relied upon’ and ‘there is no freedom of expression’, council member and Law Society Charity chair Nigel Dodds reports in Fiji: The Rule of ...
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Freshfields’ £10k bursary for underprivileged students
A magic circle firm is to offer students from less privileged backgrounds an annual bursary of £10,000 to finance their law degree studies. The scheme, which follows coalition social mobility adviser Alan Milburn’s calls for higher education to take greater account of candidates’ social backgrounds, will ...
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Foot in the door
Work experience is now seen as critical to securing a training contract, but with hundreds of students vying for every vacation scheme place and badgering firms of all sizes for work experience, how fair is the competition? In 2009, former Labour minister Alan Milburn’s Fair Access ...
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Time to get along
Obiter approached the APIL president's lunch with the trepidation of Back to the Future's Doc Brown fearing Marty McFly would meet his future self. Surely the universe would implode if the invited guests - including APIL and its nemeses, FOIL and the ABI ...
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Guerrilla lawfare
There can’t be many legal jobs tougher than that of attorney general of Colombia during the 1990s, when the mineral-rich South American country was close to becoming a failed state. Happily, Alfonso Valdivieso Sarmiento (pictured) survived three years of bringing charges against some of the most powerful men in the ...
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Beaver diva
Obiter understands why readers who work in criminal justice might be distracted by the Ministry of Justice’s attempts, to put it kindly, to fillet their livelihoods. But as you occasionally lift your eyes from rejected LSC forms, don’t you wonder what the few ...
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In cod we trust
Fish and chips taste better in Yorkshire, as any native of the county will agree (yes - Ed). Newly merged Skipton and Keighley firm AWB Charlesworth Solicitors has made the delicacy the centrepiece of a regular informal Friday lunchtime get-together with local professional contacts. According to commercial partner Umberto Vietri: ...
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Serve and protect
The article ‘Mixed-up wills have no value in law’ surprised me a great deal. I disagree that there is any need for a change in the legislation. The provisions of section 9 of the Wills Act are specific and rigid, for the very reason that they are intended to protect ...
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News
Serve and protect
The article ‘Mixed-up wills have no value in law’ surprised me a great deal. I disagree that there is any need for a change in the legislation. The provisions of section 9 of the Wills Act are specific and rigid, for the very reason that they are intended to ...
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Writing on the wall
My postbox is bombarded every day with offers of seminars from a multitude of providers. Now on offer is a ‘Crash Course on Punctuation & Grammar’. Have standards of entry to our profession dropped to such an all-time low that our solicitors require after-admission training on the use of commas ...
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Renewal rage
I write to advise of my disgust at the way the SRA is handling requests for practice certificate renewals. I received a PC renewal notice. I have written several times by email, fax and DX to the SRA, but with no response. I have tried ringing, but of course the ...
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Could you thrive in the slipstream of big brands?
We’ve yet to see what impact big money brands will have on the legal market but the general consensus seems to be that it won’t be pretty. Legal services sold like cans of beans by giant corporations with no soul or sense of duty and no ...
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Ruling takes foreign lawyers further on passage to India
India’s much-vaunted ‘road map’ for the liberalisation of its £2.6bn legal services market has inched closer to reality following a high court ruling in a case concerning magic circle and international firms. In a ruling yesterday, the Chennai high court gave foreign firms the right to ...
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HSBC accused of blocking panel appeal
The Law Society has accused HSBC and its conveyancing panel manager Countrywide of 'unreasonable' behaviour over membership of the bank's conveyancing panel. According to a statement, the Society had been told by the bank and Countrywide that an appeal process was in place for firms who ...