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The Legal Services Board has approved a rule change by the Solicitors Regulation Authority which will make it easier for law firms to switch regulators. In a move which is likely to see more firms leave the SRA than join it, the requirement that they must obtain six years of run-off cover before switching to another regulator will be removed.

Conservative MPs yesterday cautioned the government against over-reacting to the abuses in the personal injury market by taking away the right of genuinely injured people to sue. Bob Neill, the chairman of the justice select committee, also warned the SRA that it needed to focus more on rogue PI solicitors than arguments with the Law Society over independent regulation.

A drastic reduction in the role of the Inns of Court in the training of barristers – to the point where barristers would not have to be members of one – and an end to the required period of 12 months for pupillages are on the table as the Bar Standards Board takes the next step in its Future Bar Training initiative.

An assistant solicitor and his firm have been handed hefty fines after the failure of a Chinese wall between two clients, a woman and her abusive husband, led to the man being told her new address against her specific instructions.

A solicitor who failed to ask for either personal or professional references before recruiting a conveyancer who went on to carry out a series of frauds, has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. Among the documents forged by the fraudster was a practising certificate from the previous year.

More than 50 solicitors, barristers and in-house counsel have volunteered to outsmart predictive software based on artificial intelligence in a ground-breaking lawyer v machine challenge. Lawyers will have a week to predict whether real PPI complaints were upheld or rejected by the Financial Ombudsman, before CaseCrunch has its go.

The Legal Services Board has marked as “sufficient” action plans produced by legal regulators to introduce price transparency and release other information to the public to help with purchasing decisions. The verdict on the original action plans published at the end of June came in the wake of the regulators moving to the next stage of consulting on how they would implement transparency.

The Bar Standards Board will say today that new rules on publishing prices should extend to referral barristers as well as those handling public access work. It comes as the Council for Licensed Conveyancers also issued their plans for improving transparency to help the consumers of legal services.

A European legal services provider specialising in advising tech companies has launched a prototype of what it calls the first business-to-business legal chatbot and, continuing its rapid expansion, plans to open a London office at the end of the year.

A team of 11 partners and 22 other commercial lawyers has left troubled Slater & Gordon for BLM as it looks to expand further beyond its core insurance law specialism. Meanwhile, a group of internal shareholders at AIM-listed law firm Gateley have sold £10m worth of shares.