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Judges have started coming out against the controversial flexible operating hours pilot, with one describing it as “the most retrograde step in terms of diversity in my memory”. The resident judge at Taunton Crown Court said “this experiment is misconceived”, and a deputy district judge questioned the impact on her colleagues.

A sole principal who failed in a rare challenge to an intervention in the High Court last year has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, and ordered to pay over £70,000 in costs. It found that her judgement had been “impaired” by the influence of a “significant client”, who was also a struck-off solicitor.

Two solicitors have agreed to leave the profession rather than face a strike-off or suspension, one for overcharging estates, the other for not disclosing to either the Solicitors Regulation Authority or Legal Ombudsman that attendance notes on a file had been backdated.

A solicitor who was originally cleared by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has now been fined £5,000 after the decision was overturned by the High Court. It is the latest case involving the Axiom Legal Financing Fund, where solicitors borrowed hundreds of thousands of pounds, ostensibly to fund disbursements in personal injury cases, but instead used the money for general practice funding.

The Mail on Sunday has been forced to publish a ruling highlighting its regulator’s serious concerns about the way it reported the conduct of a QC in a money laundering case. The newspaper was also criticised for misreporting the status of a related Solicitors Regulation Authority investigation.

The turnover of personal injury claims management companies (CMCs) has continued to tumble over the past year, falling 41% in just two years to £182m, according to the Ministry of Justice, which also highlighted how CMCs that offer damages-based agreements are struggling to comply with the law.

The group that owns London law firm Gordon Dadds today became the second listed law firm after the shareholders of what was Work Group plc yesterday approved the reverse takeover. The new company was admitted to trading on AIM today, with Gordon Dadds chief executive Adrian Biles owning 26.7% of the shares in issue.

National law firm Simpson Millar has insisted that it is “business as usual” after its listed parent copany, Fairpoint Group, announced its intention to appoint administrators. Last month, the group announced that its debt had been sold on and that a £5m funding facility had been provided to the legal services business.

The High Court has imposed a nine-month suspension on a senior solicitor after he successfully appealed his striking-off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. Mrs Justice Carr said the misconduct was serious, but not at the highest level, and also criticised the SRA for the delay in bringing the case and some of the allegations it made.

The team behind LawBot, the legal advice chatbot created last year by Cambridge University law students, is planning a live ‘lawyer v machine’ challenge similar to the one in which IBM’s Watson won the US quiz show Jeopardy. LawBot was relaunched earlier this week and has started signing up law firms keen to secure access to leads generated by the chatbot.