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The Crown Prosecution Service has taken over prosecution of a major legal aid fraud by a law firm after the Court of Appeal criticised the Legal Aid Agency for trying to run the case through the fraud department of a local authority instead. It expressed surprise that both the agency and Thurrock council had tried this course of action.

A commercial barrister has been suspended from practice for failing to comply with an order of the Legal Ombudsman and requests from his own regulator, only two years after a series of similar findings as well as a suspension for handling client money when he should not have done.

Lawyers are the not the only ones blocking innovation in larger law firms, the head of IT at DLA Piper has said, highlighting also the need to decentralise responsibility for innovation and allowing it to happen in individual practice groups.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off a solicitor for practising while bankrupt and dishonestly misleading the police that he worked for a firm when attending clients at police stations. He was also found to have breached conduct rules by failing to repay £8,250 he borrowed from a “vulnerable” elderly man he represented.

The cost of conveyancing has risen 37% over the past decade, greater than the overall rise in the cost of moving home, new research has found. But it remains a relatively small proportion of the overall cost of moving home, however, which was put at £9,472 – although this was considerably more than people budgeted for.

A legal tech start-up has won funding from the country’s leading social tech funder to help develop its speech-to-text tool, which also uses IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence (AI) system, so that it can be used in courts. Meanwhile, Dentons’ business accelerator has made its latest investment in an “AI-powered expertise finding platform”.

The training reforms unveiled last week by the Solicitors Regulation Authority are “not a panacea for diversity” though they could make a “significant contribution”, a report for the regulator has concluded. The report also warned that the arrival of the solicitors qualifying examination in 2020 would make the training market “more complex to navigate”.

The claim by insurers that the UK is the “whiplash capital of Europe” is a flimsy one based on unreliable data that has been cherry picked to support “specific reform agendas”, an academic has argued. He said this cast doubt on suggestions that fraudulent or exaggerated whiplash claims are common.

The Bar Standards Board has opened the way to replace the criminal standard of proof in disciplinary matters with the civil standard, in a move that could well ripple across the profession amid growing pressure to adopt the civil standard uniformly.

A barrister accused of forging client care letters has lost an appeal against his disbarment at the High Court. Mrs Justice Lang rejected Damian McCarthy’s argument that a Bar disciplinary tribunal was under pressure from the Bar Standards Board to convict him.