Helen Sage reports Questel-Orbit, supplier of on-line intellectual property information, has chosen Verity’s Topic search engine for its new Internet multimedia service ‘Angie’. Questel-Orbit, a subsidiary of France Telecom, specialises in patent, trade mark, scientific chemical and business information and provides more than one billion documents on-line through 250 databases. Most of its 35,000-customer base […]
Barristers’ chambers have been advised to increase security measures to protect their PCs and to back up all their data. The warning came from John Horne, secretary of Bar services and information technology at the Bar Council, in response to the recent spate of thefts of computer chips from offices. Horne pointed to various thefts […]
Peter Rees is a partner and licensed insolvency practitioner at Wansbroughs Willey Hargrave. In the High Court at the end of November, Mr Justice Laddie decided that faxed proxies were now valid in individual voluntary arrangement cases. This overruled an earlier decision in Exeter County Court. The facts of the case, to be reported as […]
John Malpas reports A GROUP of chambers which successfully set up its own pupillage clearing house system has decided not to join the Bar Council’s new scheme. The majority of the common law sets in the Compas scheme will not commit themselves to the Bar Council’s new Pupillage Applications Clearing House System (Pach) until they […]
The way members of the Law Society Council vote in important debates will now be recorded. Law Society president Martin Mears was behind the move, which was approved at the council meeting on Thursday. The initiative is part of a drive by the presidency to democratise the council. It was also widely viewed as a […]
Martin Luther King Jr, the US civil rights activist, said that “passive resistance is far more bewildering than outright rejection”. In the UK, which has not experienced a racial upheaval, what is an ethnic law student who has encountered both passive resistance and outright rejection to do? Each year thousands of students apply for trainee […]
EU commissioner Ritt Bjerregaard will discuss the growing legal issues surrounding the management of end-of-life electronic products at a conference in London next year. The event, to be held at the US Embassy on 6 and 7 February, will include Lovell White Durrant among its sponsors. Speakers will consider the environmental, legal and economic problems […]
Allen & Overy partner Richard Turnor and Farrer & Co’s Judith Hill are among the speakers at an International Bar Association seminar on the legal issues involved in operating international museums and galleries on 15 to 16 February. For further information telephone 0171 629 1206.
The recent Binder Hamlyn decision has prompted partnerships to register in Jersey “DOOMSDAY ACTIONS”, where firms face bankruptcy and disintegration from litigation, are now as much a threat to lawyers as they are to accountants. Actions have certainly grown in size and frequency against law firms in the fall-out from pre-recession takeovers, even though the […]
Pending jury actions in the High Court Queen’s Bench Division include: Nixon v Channel 4 Television Corp & ors (not before 18 December 1995); Mackenzie v Business Magazine (UK) and ors (not before 11 January 1996).
This year has seen the end of the independence of three of the great names in UK merchant banking (Kleinwort Benson, SG Warburg and Baring Brothers); rapidly followed by the City’s leading broker Smith New Court. The new owners from the US, Holland, Switzerland and Germany were already established City players, albeit primarily in different […]
NICHE law firms have the music industry carved up among themselves and have pole position in advising virtually all the top UK stars. It may only be rock ‘n’ roll, but with total revenues in excess of $40 billion worldwide and retail sales trebling in just a decade, pop music is proving one of the […]