associate news

Many readers may yearn for those days, when they just had to concentrate on their legal work, but customer service and maintaining your online reputation are now vital elements of modern legal practice. This links closely to the transparency agenda pushed by the Competition and Markets Authority and Legal Services Board, and First4Lawyers’ brand new 2021 industry white paper takes a close look at the progress law firms have made in developing consumer-friendly cultures and highlights the gaps that need more work.

The past 18 months have been difficult for law firms, from those facing a backlog of cases to conveyancers working flat-out around the stamp duty holiday deadlines.

With SDLT holiday transactions tailing off, now is a good time to look at where the overworked conveyancing market has left solicitors and think about what comes next.

LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions announces its partnership with Microsoft for Lexis Omni, the company’s technology platform for legal service delivery hosted in Microsoft Azure.This agreement takes Lexis Omni into a larger marketplace and partner ecosystem.

Conveyancers will be glad to hear that the Stamp Duty Holiday has its final cutoff point on September 30th, after which they can forget all about the rush of completions now and in late June. It’s been a stressful 18 months for everyone, but it’s been acute in this profession where a third of conveyancers know someone who’s burned out of the job altogether. But as they rush to get through the backlog of work, they’d do well to keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Ground risk specialists Terrafirma has announced a much-anticipated overhaul of the natural ground perils section in the Ground Report. The award-winning report is used by conveyancers to understand whether mining or natural ground instability hazards has implications for the property they are transacting on.

In this case study, Graeme Black, Director at The National Will Register member firm Bonnetts Solicitors discusses a case where the niece of the deceased was unsure who the executors of the estate were or if there was a later Will.

How do you calculate the return your legal firm will get from investing in a document management system (DMS)? It’s a question that’s being asked very widely as firms consider the next step in their digital transformation. To help with the answer, Advanced’s whitepaper explains how to calculate ROI using an alternative and more objective approach.

Anti-money laundering (AML), or rather non-compliance of AML rules, dominates the news. You might have read about the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) threatening enforcement action and publicly sanctioning non-compliant firms or seen the headline announcing the criminal conviction of a high-profile AML expert for international investment fraud, as just two of many recent stories.

CTS, the legal sector’s provider of cloud and IT services specifically shaped for law, have been selected by family law firm, Woolley & Co, to provide a hybrid cloud platform, which will provide greater efficiency, productivity and profitability, with fee earners able to work more flexibly.