I have read with interest the problems which the Bar is having over its proposed complaints system. It seems to me there is something curiously amiss with complaints procedures across the profession. Members of the Bar are rightly having their fair share of reservations about the schemes proposed by the Bar Council and fear that […]
KENT firm Marsons is celebrating its achievement of an Investor in People award and a Legal Aid Board franchise. According to senior partner Brian Marson, the firm is the first in the South East to hold an ISO9001 quality standard, an Investor in People award and a legal aid franchise at the same time.
SOLICITORS Indemnity Fund managing director John Speedman will retire this year after completing the fund’s most radical revamp to date. Senior colleagues see Speedman, a qualified accountant, as the driving force behind the fund’s successful management and major cost reduction, making it one of the cheapest funds to run despite rocketing claims in recent years. […]
City firm Lovell White Durrant has reversed its decision made in the 1980s to create separate shipping and commodity departments. Since this month the two departments have been operating under one roof as the commodities, trade finance and shipping department. Partner Philip Quenby said: “In the 1980s we were seduced by the lure of specialisation. […]
Our article, ‘Boodles pair go it alone’ (12 September 1995), could have suggested that Stephen Ralph and Peter Garry had left Boodle Hatfield in haste without proper notice, thus inferring that their departure had been in breach of contract and unprofessional. We now accept that we were in ignorance of the facts and accept that […]
The consensus of solicitors canvassed is that London is the place to find a banking specialist. The area is seen as reasonably buoyant, although one senior litigation partner at a top 10 City firm commented “it seems that the juniors are just not coming through”. “We are tending to do more and more advocacy in-house, […]
THE SOLICITORS Complaints Bureau will not lose its independence under a forthcoming complaints handling shake-up, according to a key Chancery Lane figure. Paul Pharaoh, chair of the Law Society’s adjudication and appeals committee, has told The Lawyer it would be “safe to say” that under a relaunch of the SCB later this year its arms-length […]
THE STEERING group handling a multi-party action against British Coal over the industrial disease Vibration White Finger has called for a speedy resolution of compensation claims. Last week The Vibration White Finger Litigation Solicitors’ Group celebrated a High Court ruling which could lead to more than 100,000 compensation claims from sufferers of the disease, which […]
Linklaters & Paines is advising the Woolwich Building Society on its plans for conversion to plc status and London Stock Exchange listing. Woolwich is the UK’s third-biggest building society with assets of about £28 billion, 12 operating subsidiaries, over three million investors and more than 550,000 borrowers. Heading Linklaters’ team are partners Jeremy Skinner and […]
Money laundering and financial misdemeanor is thriving because of a failure to properly regulate the offshore tax advice sector, according to a leading London consultant. Barry Spencer, barrister and co-founder of the international SCF Group, is calling for a regulatory framework along the lines of the Law Society and Bar Council codes of conduct. “The […]
City law firms enjoyed a bumper year in mergers and acquisitions business in 1995, earning around £200 million in fees out of a total City take of around £950 million. In many cases City firms doubled the number of deal instructions compared with 1994 and there looks to be no end in sight to the […]
CANADIAN firm Stikeman Elliott has successfully completed a US$1.3 billion Hungarian electricity privatisation operation. The practice, which opened an office in Budapest in 1993, believes the privatisation is one of the largest yet to take place in Central and Eastern Europe. Under the privatisation scheme, the Hungarian Privatisation and State Holding Company sold off a […]