Last 3 months headlines – Page 1360
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Top Lib Dem was given the task of taking the pain for Conservative-led reforms
The Scots don’t play much cricket. But Lord Wallace of Tankerness, former Lib Dem leader north of the border and now advocate general for Scotland, showed he can wield the straightest of bats during the lords debate on part 2 of LASPO. The courtliness of ...
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Lifting the lid on ‘hackgate’
by Gill Phillips, director of editorial legal services at Guardian News & Media Ltd As we all now know, News International last month settled 37 of the civil claims brought against News Group Newspapers (NGN), the publisher of the now defunct News of the World
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Is the legal profession looking at fission or fusion?
Last week I gave the President’s Oxford lecture at the Saïd Business School. It was a great privilege to be able to address a very distinguished audience on the long-term future of our profession. I felt compelled to ask what implications the freedom of barristers and solicitors to practise together ...
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An ABS game-changer as UK says g’day to Aussies
Those Aussies just can’t resist a bit of competition. From their cricket team beating us with depressing regularity in the 1990s to Paul Hogan ('you call that a knife?'), it seems a nation devoted to one-upmanship. So we shouldn’t be too surprised to see an Aussie ...
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Judge for yourself
The Law Society put together a stellar panel for the launch of its advocacy section, or the fifth inn, as president John Wotton called it. The lineup included the lord chief justice, Lord Judge (pictured), master of the rolls Lord Neuberger and president of the Queen’s bench division Sir John ...
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Bailiffs beware
Thank goodness for Jonathan Djanogly. The justice minister may look as if he has his name and job title sown on to his underpants, but under it all he is a tough guy. Djanogly’s latest ministerial statement fearlessly takes on a formidable target - bailiffs - by issuing an update ...
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Window of opportunity
Alas, Obiter’s Brighter Window campaign for high street firms is getting off to a slow start. Despite the excellent example set by Gross & Co of Bury St Edmunds it seems most managing partners are still content to display a pane of frosted glass and, if they’re really daring, a ...
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McNally unmoved as he rejects third-party capture ban
Justice minister Lord McNally has reiterated that the government has no intention of banning insurers from third-party capture. Speaking during Wednesday’s House of Lords debate on civil litigation reform, McNally said there was no proof that accident victims were harmed by a direct approach from insurance ...
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Dressing down
Somehow West London Magistrates’ Court in Southcombe Street near Barons Court tube station seemed more informal than Bow Street and Marlborough Street, certainly so far as dress code was concerned. I remember at Marlborough Street seeing my friend, the giant Irishman David Sarch, appearing one morning in a Prince of ...
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Law centres warn on legal aid cuts
Law centres will close, leaving ‘many thousands’ of the poor and marginalised without access to justice if the government’s legal aid cuts are implemented, peers have warned. In a short debate this week, Labour’s former legal aid minister Lord Bach asked what assessment the ...
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Mirror wills invalidated by signature mix-up, appeal judges rule
A simple mix-up when a husband and wife signed mirror wills 13 years ago means they have no value in law, the Court of Appeal ruled today. The ruling disinherits the couple’s intended heir and has left lawyers calling for a more flexible approach to probate law. ...
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RJW to be limited company following £53.8m Aussie takeover
Top-100 firm Russell Jones & Walker this week became the biggest beast in the new world of alternative business structures by announcing a £53.8m takeover by a stock-exchange listed Australian firm. Slater & Gordon of Melbourne announced the acquisition on Monday, saying it planned to create one the UK’s biggest ...
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Jackson civil cost reforms deferred until April 2013
The government has deferred Lord Justice Jackson's civil costs reforms until April 2013 but fought off attempts to scale back the changes. The Ministry of Justice this week confirmed that civil litigation reform will be put back by six months to give law firms time to ...
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Judges ponder action over pensions
Judges are considering legal action to block an increase in their pension contributions. The judges claim that the changes, which follow the 2010 Hutton report on public service pensions and come into force in April, would be unlawful and have set up an action group to ...
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JLD gets the message out, forsooth
What’s in a name? / That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet (Romeo and Juliet). I’m getting all Shakespearian about names here because the moniker - the Junior Lawyers Division (JLD) - defies easy definition. For starters, lots ...
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US warning on third-party funding reform
An influential US legal lobbying group has warned of 'serious concerns' about the growing power of third-party litigation funding in the UK. The Chamber Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) has already pleaded with the American Bar Association to halt the increasing use of external litigation funding ...
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Government at odds with itself on domestic violence
The debate over the definition of domestic violence used in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill highlights the absence of joined-up thinking within the government. Even as the bill appears to seek to adopt a narrower definition of domestic violence than that commonly ...
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The smoke and mirrors of whiplash rhetoric
by David Bott, president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) For some time, there has been a theme of depicting whiplash claimants as fraudsters. Jack Straw describes whiplash as a ‘profitable invention of the human imagination’.
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Lords expose intellectual bankruptcy of LASPO Part 2
The House of Lords debate which took place on 30 January revealed divided opinion on key issues in the proposed legislation in Part 2 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill. We now know the changes will be delayed. And emphasis was placed ...
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Data protection - and gossip
As the Gazette briefly reported, the European Commission published its new data protection legislation last week, providing a fresh regulatory structure with which all lawyers and law firms will have to become familiar. I shall focus on that below.