Latest news

The Bar Council has strongly attacked plans by the Bar Standards Board to force barristers to publish prices and internal complaints records. It said a requirement on chambers to publish hourly rates might actually end up decreasing transparency.

Deloitte is to become the final member of the Big Four accountancy firms to set up an alternative business structure (ABS), it announced today. It has previously said it would not go down this road due to the number of legal clients it has, but a spokeswoman explained that this position had been kept constantly under review.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has decided against striking off a solicitor it found had created and backdated correspondence and lied to both her client and her employer, after finding that a root cause of her misconduct was the firm’s culture and the pressure it exerted on her to meet billing targets. Her mental ill-health was the other factor.

The Government Legal Department has embraced design rewritten its public sector contract to make it much slimmer and more accessible to non-lawyers. The new contract was a collaborative effort that involved the Government Digital Service, focusing on user research, content design and interaction design.

David Gauke yesterday became the first solicitor to become Lord Chancellor, after he replaced the promoted David Lidington. There have now been six Lord Chancellors since the Conservatives came to power in 2010. Mr Gauke was an assistant at City firm Macfarlanes before his election in 2005.

The Legal Services Consumer Panel has warned that the second phase of reforms to the Solicitors Regulation Authority Handbook would “compound existing complexities” and could further confuse consumers. It said the reforms were “unlikely to assist consumers, especially vulnerable ones, in choosing services in times of distress”.

The Law Society has been forced to withdraw from an exclusive deal to endorse a training partner for the qualified lawyers transfer scheme (QLTS) after facing a judicial review from another provider, in the latest major stumble by the body that represents solicitors.

A CILEx member and assistant solicitor have been rebuked and fined for not making clear that they were acting for the company that referred its customers to them, rather than the customers themselves. They also admitted not recommending that the customers seek independent legal advice.

Crowdsourcing is an accurate predictor of court judgments, at best proving accurate in over eight out of ten cases, according to a rigorous analysis. A team of academics arrived at the conclusion after assessing the results of a massive competition to predict the outcome of US Supreme Court cases.

A three-year qualified solicitor has been struck off for dishonestly fabricating documents to cover up the fact she failed to negotiate an increase to after-the-event insurance cover. This meant her client or firm faced having to pay the other side’s costs.