In 1990, I visited the Washington office of a law firm widely recognised to be one of the most advanced and committed users of IT in the US legal community. The director of IT talked a lot about the culture that had been engendered within the firm. Here was an atmosphere in which IT could […]
Moorhead James acted for Oriental Restaurant Group on its admission to the official list of the London Stock Exchange and the related placing
Judgment is pending in a case in which High Court Family Division President, Sir Stephen Brown has been asked to rule on whether a widow is legally entitled to be artificially inseminated with sperm taken from her dying husband while he was in a coma.
London solicitors Manches & Co has ordered eight more copies of IBM’s VoiceType Dictation 3.0 system, bringing its total to 13 copies. The system, which allows users to dictate their own documents direct to screen and correct them without secretarial help, has been tested by the firm’s 110 fee earners over the past two years. […]
A Hampshire solicitor is planning to sue the Solicitors Indemnity Fund, claiming that it put him out of business because of an error. Michael Dalton, of Michael Dalton Solicitors in Hayling Island, said he was forced to stand down as a partner and become an employee in his own firm after he received a claims […]
Truro motorist John Summers, injured in a crash in which a loaded lorry fell on top of his car, has launched a compensation claim against WA Turtle, of Sudbury, Suffolk, and lorry driver Timothy Brooks, also of Sudbury. The writ says that Summers was driving his Cortina along the A1071 towards the A134 when a […]
Manchester law firm Pannone & Partners is spending £500,000 on a computer network intended to give all fee earners individual access to word processing and email. Pannones has hired local supplier JM Computing to put together a largely off-the- shelf package, including Microsoft Word software for word processing, Soft Solutions for document management and Groupwise […]
Tom Keevil is a solicitor with Simmons & Simmons. Section 20 of the Taxes Management Act 1970 empowers the Inland Revenue to elicit documents or information needed to pursue investigations. Its use of S.20 to obtain documents and information from non-parties to an investigation has provoked controversy. Some practitioners believe the Revenue regards S.20 as […]
Lawyers are doing clients a disservice by using archaic, poorly punctuated and abstruse language. This was the message spelt out by the Plain English Campaign at its fringe meeting at the Solicitors Annual Conference last Friday. Campaign founder Chrissie Maher said: “Even today many lawyers are still unsure of what plain English means. They wrongly […]
The lawyer representing the families of deceased and injured children of Dunblane has called for a radical change in the law, with a complete ban on private ownership of handguns. Speaking just before the publication of the Cullen Report on the Dunblane massacre, Peter Watson, head of litigation at Levy & McRae, said his personal […]
The case of the fizzing pain killers is heading for the High Court. Sanofi Winthrop, which manufactures Panadol Soluble tablets, is suing Brunner Mond & Co, of Northwich, Cheshire, for £348,000. It claims that a batch of anhydrous sodium carbonate supplied by Brunners failed to work in the way intended with the result that the […]
German lawyers get a new code of conduct next month – nearly a decade after the German Constitutional Court declared the then code of conduct for German lawyers void. The new rules will allow advertising under certain conditions and will implement the Council of the Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) code of conduct […]