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The government is to reintroduce its personal injury reforms, it was confirmed this morning in the Queen’s Speech, provoking fury among claimant lawyers. What was the Prisons & Courts Bill will not be reintroduced but there is to be both a Civil Liability Bill for the PI changes and a Courts Bill to progress court modernisation.

LawBot, a legal advice chatbot created by four Cambridge University law students, is to relaunch next month in seven countries with the aim of becoming a commercial operation funded by issuing its own cryptocurrency. The new version analyses the quality of users’ claims, moving from decision-tree reasoning to data-driven intelligence.

A new property law alliance, the Legal Sector Group, has written to the government with a detailed set of proposals on leasehold reform. It brings together the Conveyancing Association, the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives, the Society of Licensed Conveyancers and the Bold Legal Group. The Law Society has decided not to join.

Supreme Court judges should question the make-up of all-male teams of barristers appearing before the highest court in the land as their prevalence is damaging diversity in the profession, researchers have argued. The work highlighted the existence of homophily at the Supreme Court – the tendency of people to associate and bond with their own gender.

A law firm in Surrey has become the latest to be sanctioned for its involvement in stamp duty land tax avoidance schemes, even though it stopped working on them within eight hours of the Solicitors Regulation Authority issuing a warning about their dubious nature.

Nextlaw Labs – the tech venture launched by global law firm Dentons – has joined with London lawtech community Legal Geek to tour European capitals in search of the best legal technology. So far, a team of lawyers and technologists has visited Amsterdam and Berlin, and will visit Brussels this week and Paris next week, before returning to London’s Canary Wharf.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off a solicitor for dishonestly backdating enduring powers of attorney and claiming to have witnessed signatures “to save clients money” after an unblemished career of more than 40 years. He also failed to return money to a client for at least six years and used some of it for the benefit of another client.

A law firm that gave a client an assurance that it would not act for his ex-wife, but later handled two small matters for her, did not breach its fiduciary duty to him and could claim for unpaid fees, the Court of Appeal has ruled. It also found that the firm had the power to retain a lien over his files until he paid.

A fee-earner who signed lasting powers of attorney in the names of her clients and misled the Office of the Public Guardian has accepted a rebuke, £1,000 fine and ban on working for law firms in the future. Meanwhile, a solicitor and a barrister separately convicted of drink driving have also been sanctioned.

A clerk who pursued personal injury claims against the wishes of his clients has been banned from working for law firms by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. Michael Davis said he was acting “in accordance with office procedures” and was managing up to 400 live cases at any one time.