The Law Society Gazette, 19 February 2009

The new Business Court, due to open in 2010, will not now be ready until the following year, the Gazette has learned. The new court will replace the Commercial and other courts currently working from St Dunstan’s House in Fetter Lane in the City of London. It will be sited in the new Rolls Building, now under construction in Fetter Lane.

Gazette, 15 February 1989

A last minute amendment to the Legal Aid Act 1986 conferred substantial powers to the Legal Aid Board to finance litigation by groups. It got power to dispense with means testing, to alter the statutory charge rules and to award contracts to individual firms of solicitors to litigate on behalf of groups. Exactly how much of this muscle it will flex remains to be seen.

Lawyer’s death

An emergency session of the Law Society of Northern Ireland, held this week following the shooting of Republican lawyer Pat

Finucane, roundly condemned remarks made by junior Home Office minister Douglas Hogg to the effect that some Northern Ireland lawyers were ‘unduly sympathetic’ to the IRA. The Society’s president, Colin Haddick, said the remarks gave an ‘excuse’ to terrorists to make targets of solicitors and barristers in the province.

Gazette, February 1964

One of the first topics to be investigated by the [Law Society’s] new Research Department is the manpower needs of the profession. The purpose of the study will be to ensure that an adequate supply of solicitors is maintained – so that the two evils of overcrowding and undermanning are avoided.

What on earth is a solwife?

National Productivity Year is over and done with and I have not completed my ‘Solicitors’ language aids to correspondence and Kindred Subjects’, or SLACKS for short. These consist of a series of invented words intended to take the place of various phrases that we use over and over again. For example, RECLET 5 NOSTRUC means ‘I have duly received your letter of the 5th instant but regret to inform you that I am without instructions.’

I am working on several more but have already achieved a limited success with the word SOLWIFE, which is how the wife of a solicitor appears in SLACKS (no disrespect intended). Our local spouses like it, possibly because it sounds of monogamy.

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