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The barrister who won the first stage of her battle with the Bar Standards Board at the Supreme Court last week said the impact of almost five years of litigation had been “completely devastating” for her law firm. She also suggested that the courts “have their own problem with discrimination”.

The decision of the Bar Standards Board to withdraw from the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates could be a “turning point” in the regulation of barristers, the in-coming chair of the Bar Council has said. Andrew Walker QC called for a “proper dialogue” between the Bar Council and the Bar’s regulators, both the Legal Services Board and BSB.

National law firm Simpson Millar is set to make at least 20% of its workforce redundant as part of a restructuring that follows its listed parent company going into administration earlier this year. The firm said the changes were designed “to put in place a sustainable cost base following substantial under-investment under the ownership of Fairpoint Group PLC”.

A firm of solicitors should have warned a client of the significant risk that a tax avoidance scheme would not withstand a challenge from HM Revenue & Customs, the Court of Appeal has ruled. The client ended up having to pay £11.3m to settle with HMRC and issued proceedings against his solicitors the same month.

Graduates from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds are half as likely to obtain pupillages as their white peers, research for the Bar Standards Board has found. A second report found that the Bar was still viewed as “an elite, white, male-dominated profession with long-established traditions”.

A solicitor who stole more than £300,000 of his elderly and disabled client’s money using a secret bank account has been struck off. He was found have committed the “outrageous plundering” of his client’s assets in a particularly “deplorable” case of dishonest conduct.

A law firm has relaunched itself as a multi-disciplinary alternative business structure, offering corporate clients legal, accountancy, and business advisory services, with human resources advice set to follow. Its head said being able to offer SMEs more than legal services was a “unique selling point” in a crowded legal marketplace.

The Supreme Court is to review what needs to be proved when a solicitor is sued for failing to advise a client of a potential claim, in the latest of a raft of cases involving Raleys, the controversial but now defunct Barnsley law firm that acted for thousands on miners.

Efficiency innovations implemented by in-house counsel at just five big companies – such as artificially intelligent (AI) contract review – have brought annual savings totalling more than half a million hours of lawyer time, according to new guide. Similar savings were being made by legal departments in thousands of other companies globally, it said, driving change in law firms that have traditionally relied on the work.

One of the two paralegal bodies which developed the Professional Paralegal Register (PPR) to act as a voluntary regulator for the sector, has decided to pull out after only two years, it has emerged. The National Association of Licensed Paralegals withdrew this summer, citing “irreconcilable differences” over the values and purpose of the PPR.