7 June 2007

Bill changes face reversal

The government has pledged to reverse major amendments made to the Legal Services Bill in the House of Lords, accusing peers of losing sight of consumers’ interests. Though the Ministry of Justice has accepted some amendments – notably the addition of protecting the public interest to the overarching regulatory principles – minister Bridget Prentice told the commons during the bill’s second reading that she intended to overturn others, such as requiring the lord chancellor to appoint the legal services board only with the concurrence of the lord chief justice.

4 June 1997

IBA urges lawyers to confront threat posed by accountants

Large law firms should counter the big six accountants’ moves into legal services by breaking all links with them and competing in non-legal areas such as management consultancy, the International Bar Association has suggested. A scenario in which the major accounting firms have taken over the worldwide provision of international corporate legal services is ‘not implausible’.

June 1967

The Common Market

If we join the Six some of our constitutional law will have to be re-written. Interpretation and enforcement of the provisions of the Treaty of Rome would, so far as Britain is concerned, be matters not for Parliament but for the Council of Ministers. Whitehall would retire from the scene and the House of Lords would give way to the ‘Court of Justice’ of the European Community as the supreme tribunal.

June 1947

Anglo-French legal conference

Forty-four French lawyers and their ladies were guests of the Law Society in London at the Anglo-French legal conference organised by the Society with the cooperation of the General Council of the Bar.

June 1937

Attendance of articled clerks at the law schools

Members of the profession will remember that in 1922 Parliament enacted that all articled clerks should, before being admitted as solicitors, attend a year’s course of instruction at a school of law. The experience of 15 years has shown that the compulsory year’s attendance at a law school is of real value to articled clerks and consequently to our profession. But there is an ever-present conflict of interest between the claims of the school and the claims of the office.

Topics