Henry King, Denton Hall’s chair, has stepped down after his three-year term in office following an increased workload outside the firm as chair of three companies. King is chair of Rentokil, which has just successfully acquired BET, and was recently appointed chair of City Centre Restaurants. He is also the chair of GKR, an executive […]
TWO former Fox & Gibbons partners have set up a rival firm in Dubai, where a new Zaiwalla & Co office is also to open up soon. Jeremy Key, the departing senior partner at Fox & Gibbons’ Dubai office, has been joined by one of Fox & Gibbons’ London partners, Christopher Dixon, to form Key […]
The embryonic post-Maxwell pensions watchdog is showing it intends to have teeth, with appointments thus far including a City lawyer and a policeman. The appointments to Opra (Occupational Pensions Regulatory Authority) were welcomed by pensions partner at Lovell White Durrant, Harriet Dawes, deputy chair of the current Occupational Pensions Board which Opra will replace. Richards […]
Barristers are divided over whether the Bar Council should emulate the Law Society and open up the election of its office holders to all barristers, not just members of the Bar Council. A survey of 1,345 barristers conducted by the Bar Council as part of its investigation into the accountability of the Bar’s ruling body, […]
The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers has introduced a compulsory code of conduct after a heated debate about the public image of its 3,000 members. The code was backed at Apil’s conference in Manchester on Friday, when president Caroline Harmer confirmed that any lawyer who does not subscribe to the code will be barred from […]
Many young lawyers are choosing not to join local government organisations because they fear their career path may be cut short by compulsory competitive tendering. Peter Keith-Lucas, president of the newly merged Association of Council Secretaries and Solicitors, says the tendering of council legal services every five years means that many potential local government lawyers […]
WHEN the City Disputes Panel was set up in April 1994, City law firms and a number of major banks were falling over themselves to be associated with the new dispute resolution service for the financial services industry. At the outset, all looked good. The panel’s raison d’etre of offering a practical alternative to the […]
Insurance litigation specialist Berrymans is to take four marine partners from six-partner marine firm Ingledew Brown Bennison & Garrett, raising the number of partners at Berrymans to 32. The four – senior partner Martin Sutton, Ken Thwaites, Roger Miles and Stuart Armstrong – together with five assistants, will join Berrymans’ office from 2 December but, […]
An open meeting of around 60 members of the Bar Association for Commerce Finance and Industry (Bacfi) has backed calls for partnerships between barristers. The meeting, held earlier this month, was called by Bacfi’s executive committee as a means of testing the level of support within the organisation’s rank and file for its reform agenda. […]
CONTEMPT of court: the very phrase has a medieval ring to it, evoking chains and dungeons – and the dungeon in its modern form is just what was ordered by Judge Pearson when Sarah Holt and her friend and co-witness Sophie Bird refused to give evidence at Chelmsford Crown Court. The young women had probably […]
LORD Woolf has defended his decision to accept an invitation to become president of a new witnesses group following revelations that it has links with a private company. The Master of Rolls told The Lawyer he only agreed to become president of the Expert Witness Institute, chaired by the retired High Court judge Sir Michael […]
Ex-head of the French Bar and the first ever president of the French Bar Council, Guy Danet, will speak in English about civil advocacy before the French courts at Lincoln’s Inn on Tuesday, in the presence of Lord Woolf, Master of the Rolls. His talk will be followed by a panel discussion which will include […]