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Top 50 accountancy firm Barnes Roffe has become the latest to gain an alternative business structure licence, Legal Futures can reveal. Meanwhile, Nottingham Law School’s ABS and ‘teaching law firm’ has launched a business and enterprise law service to provide affordable legal advice to small businesses, entrepreneurs and charities.

The Legal Services Board has dismissed concerns about the “negative” impact of its requirement that lawyers tell clients about their complaints procedures before any work has been done. Research found “negative reactions” to the prominence of this information but the board said the problem was how some lawyers have chosen to provide it.

Manchester Law Society has called for firms to join a pro bono advice rota to help those bereaved or injured in the Manchester Arena bomb on Monday. The society is looking for firms who are willing to give pro bono advice and free representation to bereaved families to assist with applications to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority and with inquests.

A personal injury firm was forced to sell its multi-track work at a “considerable” loss after the “sudden and unexpected” withdrawal of support from its bank, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has heard as it fined two partners and a non-lawyer partner for retaining unpaid professional disbursements in its office account.

The former senior and managing partners of Manchester firm Cobbetts, as well as its former finance director, are among eight people who have been referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal over alleged incompetence in the demise of the practice.

HM Land Registry plans to live test a ‘Digital Street’ scheme which will enable the “almost instant” transfer of property ownership, backed by technology including blockchain – the secure distributed ledger underpinning the Bitcoin currency – it has emerged.

A law firm has acquired an alternative business structure licence to facilitate an equity swap, as part of its bid to integrate with a firm of Singapore lawyers and comply with restrictive local laws on ownership. A regulatory rule change in Singapore made it difficult for the branches of foreign firms to operate.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority needs to do more to crack down on law firms that take cases from companies that generate leads through cold-calling, the new president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers has said. He also warned that government PI reforms have been paused, not scrapped.

A barrister who dishonestly failed to pay his share of chambers’ fees has been disbarred. Over two years, he failed to inform 4 Kings Bench Walk of the fees he had received for 32 public access and then dishonestly failed to pay the chambers £4,236 which he was legally liable for as a result.

The Legal Services Board is to meet with the deputy president of the Supreme Court, Baroness Hale, after she expressed the senior judiciary’s concern over its statement last year that the regulatory objective of ‘encouraging an independent, strong, diverse and effective legal profession’ was “problematic”.