Last 3 months headlines – Page 1263
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Judicial watchdog probes Winehouse coroner case
The Office for Judicial Complaints is investigating the case of an assistant deputy coroner who was appointed by her senior coroner husband despite not having the minimum required experience.
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Euro patent court ‘ruinous for business’
As Britain, France and Germany haggle over which country should host a Europe-wide patent court, the professional body for UK intellectual property lawyers has warned that the proposed court would not be in the public interest - and could be ‘ruinous’ for business.
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Electing the people’s judges
To the annual president’s lunch of the Association of Council Secretaries and Solicitors, where the conversation naturally enough turned to the cheery topic of appointing coroners. Natural because the previous day’s news had been dominated by the resignation of the deputy assistant coroner who had ...
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Word power
Hopes are revving up for a legal double in the Orwell prize for non-fiction writing. Last year it was won by Lord Bingham, for The Rule of Law. This year, lawyers are represented by Nigel Winter, senior associate at Sussex firm Rawlison Butler.
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Goodman by name...
A London litigator turned into a crime fighter last week, foiling an attempted raid on a West End boutique. David Goodman, 57-year-old sole principal at Goodman & Co just off Oxford Street, was taking a cab home after working late when he saw a gang ...
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Painful birth
If your date of birth was 1 January 1980, you share it with US wrestler Randy Orton and Swedish model Elin Nordegren (pictured). And many thousands of English solicitors. The chief executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority, Antony Townsend, revealed this week that one of the bugs being encountered in ...
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Big US private equity outfits are running the rule over English law firms
Vince Cable has made worried noises about foreign takeovers of iconic British businesses, but the sell-out continues apace. This week we learned that most of our largest insurance groups are now foreign-owned.
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Memory lane
Law Society’s Gazette, 23 February 1972Lamentations of a junior partner by a Struggling Solicitor
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Automatic disqualification and apparent bias
Two jurisprudential strands were brought together by the Court of Appeal on 19 October 2011 when determining a challenge brought by Darsho Kaur, a student member of the Institute of Legal Executives (ILEX).
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Clarke raises small claims limit in county court
The limit on small claims in the county court is to be doubled to £10,000 as part of government measures to speed up civil litigation. Justice secretary Kenneth Clarke today set out plans to divert up to 80,000 more cases to a small claims mediation process that can be carried ...
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Unlocking lock-up days
Lock-up is not something firms can afford (literally) to stick their heads in the sand about, yet the number of firms struggling with lock-up (unbilled work in progress plus debtors excluding VAT) is staggering. Crowe Clark Whitehill surveyed over 60 law firms recently, asking them to ...
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Change the rules
The balance of power is currently with the lenders, which are seeking to control the property market, but how many banks can we or our clients really embargo?
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Registering discontent
As members of the Law Society Conveyancing Quality Scheme, we wrote to HSBC to enquire whether or not we were still on their panel of solicitors as we had been for many years. We received a letter from Countrywide Property Services to advise that they were administering the HSBC panel ...
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Protect legal privilege, bar urges government
The Bar Council has urged the government to protect the right of citizens to hold private conversations with their lawyers. The call, supported the Law Society, comes as the proposed Protection of Freedoms Bill, intended to protect people from unwarranted state intrusion in their private lives, goes through parliament.
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DAS back in the black
Legal expenses insurer DAS has reported a dramatic turnaround in financial performance during 2011. The UK group posted a pre-tax profit of £9.74m last year compared with a £470,000 loss in 2010, when the company was hit by increasing claims frequencies and costs. Turnover rose from ...
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Jackson ‘Plan B’ splits claimant lobby
Deep divisions surfaced in the personal injury claimant lobby this week after the proposal of a compromise deal on the Jackson reforms. Leaders of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers said they are now prepared to drop blanket opposition to Jackson’s plans to switch the burden ...
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Law Commission to tidy law on financial provision after break-up
The Law Commission is to bring ‘clarity and predictability’ to the law entitling married couples and civil partners to claim financial provision from one another upon divorce or dissolution of their partnership, it was announced this week. The commission said that it aims to review two ...
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Joey Barton is no martyr, he’s a danger to justice
Is Joey Barton a media star or a footballer? The saddest indictment of the QPR midfielder’s career to date is that to many he is renowned more for his Twitter feed than his sporting abilities. Barton has talent on the field, though perhaps not as great ...
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Rising cost of motor premiums down to support of claimants
by Byron Shepherd, a casualty claims-handler at a major insurance company The Gazette recently ran a story headlined ‘Insurers to blame for motor premium hike’. This claim is demonstrable nonsense.
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Being pushed out
I work in a provincial practice with three town centre-based offices in Cheshire, and it is with interest that I read about HSBC’s new ’shortlisted’ panel of 43 law firms and licensed conveyancers. This follows talk of some of the other mainstream lenders such as the Lloyds Banking Group also ...