Latest news

Slater & Gordon has announced yet another eye-watering loss for its last financial year, mainly due to yet another write-down of goodwill – this time of £215m – following the acquisition of Quindell’s professional services division. It is also to spin off its UK operation into a separate business.

Peace Crowell, a niche US firm specialising in energy and infrastructure projects, has opened a London office as an alternative business structure (ABS). In other ABS news, Simpson Millar has sold its financial services arm, Metamorph Law has made another acquisition, and Irwin Mitchell has unveiled encouraging financial results.

A solicitor whose judgement was affected by the fact he was in a personal relationship with his client has been fined by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal for misleading a court. The tribunal warned that such relationships are “potentially fraught with difficulties, even if entered into with a good understanding of those difficulties”.

‘Robot lawyer’ LISA, an artificial intelligence (AI) app, has teamed up with Billy Bot, a barrister’s clerk chatbot, in what has been heralded as the first ‘robot relationship’ in the legal services world. For those LISA users who want help from a human lawyer, Billy Bot can refer them to a direct access barrister.

Law firms have been warned not to charge excessive fees for payment protection insurance claims, while claims management companies were told that becoming alternative business structures was not a way to avoid caps on their fees.

The Law Society has failed in its bid to strike out a negligence claim by a law firm that was the victim of a fraud after the details of another firm it had checked on the society’s online ‘Find a Solicitor’ facility turned out to be false.

A trainee solicitor has been handed a suspended jail sentence after being convicted of providing illegal immigration advice and services. The judge said he had set out to deceive vulnerable clients seeking help with immigration applications.

A firm responsible for pressuring people into making holiday sickness claims had its licence cancelled by the Claims Management Regulator last week. It had encouraged holiday-goers to fabricate or embellish symptoms of gastric illness to get compensation.

Two solicitors have been jailed for a total of six years and one month for their part in committing a fraud and perverting the course of justice in bringing a £20,000 breach of contract claim against a former employee. One of the giveaways was that the Law Society copyright at the foot of each page was incorrect.

A Sussex solicitor lost in a “fog of confusion” over a failed multi-million pound investment scheme has been fined £50,000 by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, one of the highest individual fines it has handed out. It found that despite being a “very experienced solicitor” and former law lecturer, her “primary failings” had been incompetence.