The drift of senior lawyers to top flight management jobs outside the profession has continued with the appointment of Osborne Clarke corporate partner Jeremy Simon to the board of Prism Rail. Prism is one of the few privatised rail companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange. Simon will handle the development of corporate services, including […]
Fraudsters using false financial instruments are stealing more than £6 million a day from businesses, individuals and even governments, according to a report by the International Chamber of Commerce. (The Times 1 March). That bland but startling report conceals much more than it reveals. The cost of fraud to society runs into billions and affects […]
The Parliamentary Ombudsman, Sir William Reid, has criticised the Legal Aid Board’s handling of correspondence. Referring to a complaint that the LAB was evasive and dishonest in its handling of solicitors’ correspondence, he said last week: “Delays occurred in associating letters with the file and in replying to correspondence, and points raised by the solicitors, […]
DAVID Andrews, former managing partner of London firm Clifford Turner and the first UK management consultant to specialise in advising law firms, has been inducted as a Fellow of the US-based College of Law Practice Management to recognise his contributions to law firm management. His citation called him the “best known legal management consultant outside […]
GARY STREETER is one month into his role as parliamentary secretary for the Lord Chancellor’s Department and has already created a furore by calling legally aided litigants “state-funded Rottweilers”. As a qualified solicitor, Streeter may presume he is qualified to make such a comparison, especially as he spent 16 years working at Plymouth firm Foot […]
IN A landmark judgment the House of Lords has allowed the human rights organisation Liberty to intervene in a case. This is believed to be the first time written third-party intervention has been allowed in a criminal case before the Lords and could set a precedent for similar interventions. The appeal concerned evidence obtained by […]
Having to fight off a bid by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission to prise fee income information out of all Scottish law firms was a rather rude and sudden introduction to the presidency of the Law Society of Scotland. But Grant McCulloch, solicitor-advocate and partner in the Edinburgh office of Drummond Miller WS, is used […]
War on crime was the message. But the White Paper on crime and punishment of Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Forsyth had more than one battle in mind last month. Tucked in between the hard-line penal reforms was the blueprint for a radical overhaul of the criminal legal aid process in Scotland. Proposals for […]
The government’s new criminal compensation scheme is riddled with holes, according to the lawyer who overturned the original scheme. Andrew Dismore, who got the first tariff-based criminal compensation scheme of Home Secretary Michael Howard overturned in the House of Lords in 1994, is to publish a critique of the new scheme, in force since last […]
Alison Laferla reports City firm Berwin Leighton is completely revamping its IT system in an attempt to “leapfrog the competition”. The firm has opted to run on an Intel platform and Microsoft NT, the successor to the MS DOS operating system. The contract for upgrading the IT system, worth over half a million pounds, has […]
Colchester man Matthew Quinn has launched a High Court compensation claim in which he is suing Essex police for damages for alleged assault and battery. Quinn seeks damages, including aggravated and exemplary damages, for alleged assault, battery, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution. His writ says the claim is a due to police actions on and […]
The House of Lords is deciding whether to allow a challenge over the defences open to those charged with failure to comply with enforcement notices. The Law Lords have invited the Crown to express its views on the application in the case of R v Wicks to appeal against conviction in respect of failure to […]