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While the Bar continues to increase in size, the junior Bar is shrinking, in part because of competition from solicitors, the profession’s leader has warned. Bar Council chairman Andrew Langdon QC highlighted wellbeing and diversity as two further challenges to a Bar that he said was otherwise changing with the times and following the market.

Some clients worry about being “bamboozled by legal jargon” if they complain to their lawyers, a fear that can be borne out by responses that are “seeming calculated to ‘overwhelm’ or ‘intimidate’ the customer”, according to new research.

The head of the alternative business structure set up by company formations specialist and legal publisher Jordans has set its sights on international expansion. Debbie Farman said Jordans Corporate Law was “a concept we can replicate globally”, after growing its turnover from £67,000 in 2014 to £1.1m this year.

Legal jobs are already being lost to technology, with the figure climbing to tens of thousands over the next two decades as automation and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) take hold, according to the Law Society. In the shorter term, the society also predicted that growth in the turnover of law firmswould be modest, with little or no ‘Brexit dividend’.

A chartered legal executive who amended clients’ wills for her own benefit and a drink-driving solicitor are among those whose misconduct has been handled internally by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in recent weeks, rather than referring them to a disciplinary tribunal.

A solicitor has been awarded £70,000 in libel damages after he was accused by a newspaper of incitement to commit perjury. Mr Justice Nicklin said it was difficult to imagine “a more serious allegation to make against the professional reputation of a solicitor”.

There needs to be more work to encourage solicitors to apply for judicial positions and the convention that stops judges returning to practice should be reviewed, a House of Lords report has recommended. It also called for chartered legal executives to be allowed to progress beyond the current ceiling of district judge.

Thousands of small businesses are flocking to a purpose-built legal hub, operated by alternative business structure LHS Solicitors, to access online documents. Some 35,000 documents have been downloaded from the Federation of Small Businesses Legal Hub – provided by LHS on a white-label basis – since its launch last month.

Gordon Dadds has started making good on its promise to be acquisitive, with the recently listed law firm announcing the purchase of a corporate tax advisory business for up to £8m. City-based CW Energy LLP describes itself as the leading independent corporate tax consultancy to the oil and gas industry.

A director of the National Crime Agency has told solicitors that the legal profession is worse than any other financial services sector in reporting money laundering suspicions. Donald Toon said solicitors were “absolutely at the front line of the detection mechanism for money laundering” but “something is not working effectively”.