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A ‘mystery shopping’ exercise to test law firms’ ability to communicate with customers has shown progress, yet the proportion of solicitors willing to follow up incoming calls from the public, although better than last year, was still “drastically low”.

Company directors should consider the risks of using artificial intelligence technology so as to understand and manage their liability, according to a report by magic circle law firm Slaughter & May. AI was “the most transformative technology” of this century, it said. However, risks included AI being maliciously ‘re-purposed’.

The High Court has overturned a finding of dishonesty made by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal against a prominent solicitor because the allegation was not tested during the hearing. The case also saw the president of the Queen’s Bench Division, Sir Brian Leveson, insist that honesty and integrity are not synonymous.

The number of law firms closed down by the Solicitors Regulation Authority has fallen to its lowest point for more than a decade, as the impact of the 2008 crash finally recedes, figures released today have shown in an annual review that put into numbers the amount of work the regulator does.

Bar students are struggling to understand ethical values because of the “massive memory test” awaiting them in the examination room, a senior lecturer has claimed. William Ralston, a former barrister, also questioned why anti-money laundering does not feature in the Bar professional training course exam.

The government is to reintroduce its personal injury reforms, it was confirmed this morning in the Queen’s Speech, provoking fury among claimant lawyers. What was the Prisons & Courts Bill will not be reintroduced but there is to be both a Civil Liability Bill for the PI changes and a Courts Bill to progress court modernisation.

LawBot, a legal advice chatbot created by four Cambridge University law students, is to relaunch next month in seven countries with the aim of becoming a commercial operation funded by issuing its own cryptocurrency. The new version analyses the quality of users’ claims, moving from decision-tree reasoning to data-driven intelligence.

A new property law alliance, the Legal Sector Group, has written to the government with a detailed set of proposals on leasehold reform. It brings together the Conveyancing Association, the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives, the Society of Licensed Conveyancers and the Bold Legal Group. The Law Society has decided not to join.

Supreme Court judges should question the make-up of all-male teams of barristers appearing before the highest court in the land as their prevalence is damaging diversity in the profession, researchers have argued. The work highlighted the existence of homophily at the Supreme Court – the tendency of people to associate and bond with their own gender.

A law firm in Surrey has become the latest to be sanctioned for its involvement in stamp duty land tax avoidance schemes, even though it stopped working on them within eight hours of the Solicitors Regulation Authority issuing a warning about their dubious nature.