THE LEGAL pitfalls faced by local authorities when they sell off property assets are outlined in a new report published by City firm Nabarro Nathanson. Nabarros planning partner David Hawkins drew up the document with Stephen Clark, a partner in the local authority consultancy of surveyors Hillier Parker. The report advises councils on how to […]
GOVERNMENT proposals to restrict media reporting of industrial tribunals will hamper proper coverage of such cases and would erode the “principle of open justice”, say lawyers for the newspaper industry. Increased powers to limit the identification of parties would apply to defendant companies as much as plaintiffs. Lawyers say reduced reporting would discourage members of […]
A MASSIVE eight-fold increase in House of Lords court fees, including a brand new £500 fee just for petitioning for leave to appeal, come into effect next Wednesday. The new fee structure will take the average cost of fees in an appeal case to £4,500. The scale of this rise overshadows the 9 per cent […]
MANY magistrates courts have poor facilities including “dismal and dirty surroundings” and inadequate financial management, according to a report. And while all Magistrates’ Courts Committees (MCCs), the bodies which run the courts, have begun to form strategic plans, performance monitoring is poor. The result is that MCCs and justices’ clerks “often do not know how […]
Lord Woolf is frank about the problems facing the civil justice system – they are problems which a competent solicitor may help his clients to avoid but which nevertheless entrap far too many users of the English courts. The proposals for multi-track cases (over £10,000) might seem to differ little from the way the Commercial […]
There has been much comment on the content of Lord Justice Woolf’s report Access to Justice. Both professional bodies and lawyers have welcomed proposals, principally aimed at the litigating public, which embrace the speed and fairness of dispute resolution and proportionate costs. But what will the Woolf report mean in practice? It is in the […]
An honorary degree of laws has been awarded to Lord Hoffmann of Chedworth, a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. He received the award from the University of the West of England in recognition of his contribution to the development of professional legal vocational education. Leonard Hoffmann studied in South Africa, where he was brought up, […]
“From chalk and talk to hands-on action” is how one trainee describes the transition from the academic degree stage to the vocational LPC. Now in its second year, the LPC is still having its initial problems ironed out – some of the course materials had gaps and these have been filled, but new holes are […]
COURTS campaigners received good and bad news this week. Lawyers in Rugby managed to save their threatened local County Court, but colleagues in York suffered rescheduled criminal hearings because of the lack of Crown Court judges. Rugby lawyers are celebrating after winning a reprieve over Court Service Agency (CSA) plans to shut the County Court […]
THE LAW Society’s journal The Gazette appears in grave danger of being drawn into the political battle currently raging within the Law Society. Martin Mears is understood to be fuming over a scathing attack by Paisner & Co partner Stephen Levinson against his views on discrimination in last week’s editorial/comment page of The Gazette. The […]
Barrister Catherine Foster is not a member of Ropewalk Chambers in Nottingham as reported in The Lawyer 10 October but is based at Plowden Buildings, the chambers of Bruce McIntyre and William Lowe, in the Temple.
If carefully presented, a firm’s financial reports can become a powerful means of encouraging partners to take action. The accounting function encompasses a wide role. At one end of the spectrum, it is a simple ‘bean counting’ operation within the various regulatory requirements of the Inland Revenue and the Solicitors Accounts Rules. The most common […]