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The Bar Standards Board is reviewing whether there are “unjustified and discriminatory barriers to pupillage” at the advertising and recruitment stage, Legal Futures can reveal. Forming part of the Future Bar Training programme, it reflects concerns that access to pupillage is one of the biggest barriers to increasing diversity at the Bar.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority needs to take a tougher approach to non-disclosure agreements, a leading legal ethics expert has told MPs. Professor Richard Moorhead linked the issue to a wider approach to ethics among solicitors that he described as “minimalistic professionalism”, including wrongly seeing the client’s interests as paramount.

An experienced barrister has been suspended from practice for seven months for repeating false rape, assault and conspiracy to murder claims about a fellow barrister in the robing rooms of Crown Courts. He also contacted that barrister’s wife, a solicitor, on LinkedIn, and suggested that her husband was in trouble.

One of the claimant solicitors working with the Ministry of Justice on the new small claims limit for personal injury cases says he is operating on the assumption that it will not happen until October 2019 at the earliest – six months later than the government’s target. He also warned that the reforms may unintentionally trigger a “have a go” culture among claimants.

A solicitor who “abrogated any responsibility” for her firm’s finances, allowing her fellow partner to take £512,000 from its accounts over five years to feed his gambling habit, has been fined £20,000 by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. She argued that he “deliberately concealed” his misconduct from her.

A judge has dismissed a claim by a law firm paralegal that he was the victim of disability discrimination, finding he had “dishonestly” altered a document about his medical condition and that, in any case, he had not told his employer about his supposed post-traumatic stress disorder.

Justice minister Lord Keen today set the stage for next week’s House of Lords debate on the Civil Liability Bill with an uncompromising message that there are “too many unmeritorious whiplash claims made each year which proceed without challenge or investigation”. He also made clear the government’s intention to extend the application of fixed recoverable costs.

The head of marketing at a firm that took money from the scandal-hit Axiom Legal Financing Fund has been banned from working in the profession after he accepted kick-backs from referral fees paid with Axiom money.

Criminal defence lawyers in England and Wales could become “extinct”, the Law Society has warned on the back of data showing that this is an increasingly ageing part of the profession. It comes amid cross-profession unity for action over the huge damage lawyers say the government is causing the criminal justice system.

A claims management company has failed to overturn the cancellation of its authorisation, which was found to have been “rented” to a marketing company which operated a call centre to generate personal injury leads. A judge said it was conducting “no business of its own” when the Claims Management Regulator intervened.