WHITE collar criminals locked up in the Australian state of New South Wales could be forced to pay AUS$50,000 (£22,000) a year for their stay in prison if a law proposed by the state’s premier is passed. In an unprecedented move Bob Carr has announced plans to charge white collar offenders and prisoners jailed for […]
FORMER Lace Mawer property partner David Wetherell has moved in-house to run the compliance department of a group of stockbrokers and fund managers. Wetherell, who was a partner at the Manchester firm for four years, has been appointed group compliance officer and company secretary at The Tilney Group. He says he was not looking to […]
MICHAEL Howard will have difficulty pushing through legislation to reinstate the tariff-based criminal injuries compensation scheme declared unlawful by the Lords, the Law Society predicts. The ruling against the Home Secretary’s controversial scheme has been applauded by the Law Society and hailed as a major victory for the victims of crime by the lawyers who […]
OFFICIAL Referee Judge Bowsher QC is running a pilot scheme to hear summonses by telephone. The scheme, which was suggested by Lord Woolf, is only available to solicitors whose case is in the list of the Official Referee. To comply, all the parties have to agree to be heard over the telephone and at least […]
Mrs Justice Arden, chair of the Law Commission, has some sharp comments about the large number of commission reports which have not been implemented by the Government in the past 15 years. Some 20 reports have not seen the light of day in terms of legislation and these figures do not include reports the government […]
THE EMPLOYMENT team of City law firm Hill Taylor Dickinson has decamped to Bristol-based law firm Osborne Clarke – but both sides insist they remain good friends. A total of five employment specialists are due to leave the firm at the end of the month to work from Osborne Clarke’s London premises, led by team […]
London-based Queen’s Business and Secretarial College is to begin offering part-time courses leading to its Legal Secretarial Certificates. Ollie Edwards, Queen’s marketing director, says: “The course is designed for secretaries who want to change direction and move into the legal field.” The college can be contacted on 0171 589 8583.
In-house lawyer Susie Flook has moved from US-owned food producer CPC, where she was group legal counsel and company secretary at its UK subsidiary, to Guinness as intellectual property lawyer reporting to the company’s group legal director Kenneth Mildwaters. Australian-qualified Flook spent seven years at CPC and five years before that at Coca Cola. She […]
While British lawyers spent this month’s American Bar Association (ABA) conference forging contacts and drumming up business, their American colleagues spent much of their time debating euthanasia. And when they weren’t discussing physician-assisted suicide, they were grappling with a host of other social issues. It all left the Brits a tad bemused. As one senior […]
LORD Justice Saville is to deliver a keynote speech on arbitration at the Denning Lecture held by the in-house barristers’ group Bacfi. The Appeal Court judge has accepted an invitation by the Bar Association for Commerce Finance and Industry to deliver the annual Denning Lecture on 22 May. Judge Saville will speak on arbitration and […]
THE SCOTTISH Bar has revamped its training requirements for trainees, with the introduction of a month of formal classroom study ahead of practical training. The changes to training procedure follow a review initiated by the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Andrew Hardie QC. Much of the detail of the revised training programme has been […]
LONDON solicitor Hemamali Graham was last week sentenced to six months in prison after being convicted of attempting to obtain property by deception. Judge Jeremy Fordham, who sentenced Graham at the Inner London Crown Court last Monday, said that she had “deliberately and dishonestly” made a false mortgage application to the Yorkshire Building Society in […]