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The shares of alternative business structure Quindell plc suffered yet another dive yesterday after it emerged that the company’s largest institutional investor has halved its stake in recent months.

There is to be a drive to recruit retiring law firm partners to the senior judiciary in a bid to improve diversity, it has emerged. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, said he is looking at a “more sensible way” of recruiting partners who retire early onto the High Court bench.

The Bar Standards Board has apologised for the “inordinately slow” progress in implementing Legal Services Act changes that will enable barristers to practice in novel ways, as it set out a timetable for broadening its reach into entity regulation.

Mr Justice Green, chairman of the Advocacy Training Council, has condemned the lack of a “level playing field” for publicly funded advocates, which is leading to the practice of “selling litigation rights”.

Two barristers have been disbarred for repeatedly refusing to pay a total of almost £12,000 between them in fines and costs. Meanwhile, In a separate ruling, a tribunal disbarred another barrister for conduct representing a “persistent departure from the standards expected of a barrister”.

The Bar Standards Board is to launch a ‘professional statement’ which, like the ‘competence statement’ being developed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, will attempt to describe the knowledge and skills barristers should possess at the point of qualification.

The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that a TV medical negligence advert for Merseyside personal injury specialists Michael W Halsall Solicitors was “likely to cause undue distress to pregnant viewers”.

The turnover of SME law firms in London and South East rose by 4% this year, according to an annual benchmarking survey by accountants HW Fisher & Co. However, the survey warned that rising overheads would continue to put pressure on profits.

Alternative business structure Quindell plc suffered another day of dizzying collapse in its share price on Tuesday, with a second consecutive 20% fall. The AIM-listed legal outsourcing business has now lost more than half of its value in just three weeks.

The High Court has ruled that a law firm cannot escape responsibility for handling complaints relating to a sole practice with which it merged. It said that as Kerman & Co had enjoyed the benefit and goodwill of the deal, it also had to accept the burden.