Last 3 months headlines – Page 1362
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Deadline looms for online PC renewal
More than one-third of solicitors had yet to start renewing their practising certificates online through the mySRA website by Tuesday of this week, the Solicitors Regulation Authority said. The deadline for the first batch of registrations is Monday (13 February).
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Referral proposals ‘won’t work’
The government must abandon its current proposals to ban referral fees in personal injury cases and start again from scratch, Chancery Lane has urged. Writing in the Gazette today, Law Society policy chief Mark Stobbs says the relevant amendments to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and ...
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Peers pillory third-party code
Justice secretary Kenneth Clarke may reconsider the case for statutory regulation of third-party litigation funding amid claims that a voluntary code has ‘manifest weaknesses’. The government, which has so far favoured self-regulation for external litigation funders, hinted at the change when it came under pressure for ...
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Roger Smith: legal aid reforms ‘unsustainable’
The director of law reform and human rights organisation Justice has condemned the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill as ‘so bad’ that it will not survive if it is enacted. Roger Smith (pictured) described the package of reforms in the bill, which ...
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Clarity needed over civil litigation
Whatever one’s views on the recommendations of Lord Justice Jackson’s Review of Civil Litigation Costs - and few litigation lawyers will find the whole report entirely to their liking - most would expect the implementation process to be well-managed and transparent.
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Andrew Grech: leading by example
When Andrew Grech joined Australian firm Slater & Gordon in 1994, the firm was a quarter of its present size. Now, with some 60 offices around Australia, it handles around 20-25% of the national personal injury legal market, and Grech’s skills earned him the title of Managing Partner of the ...
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Landmark judgment on fixed-share partner rights
Fixed-share partners of law firms are not employees and cannot claim employment rights before a tribunal, the Court of Appeal has ruled. However the ruling, in a case brought by Martin Tiffin against southern England law firm Lester Aldridge (LA), applies only when fixed-share partners enjoy some of the ‘obligations ...
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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 ...