Latest news

Slater & Gordon’s leadership remains “convinced of the strategic merit” of taking on the UK consumer legal services market, its chief executive said yesterday as he revealed that it has had an encouraging start to the current financial year – although this was in part because of the jobs that have been cut in recent months.

An ‘angel investor’ network is being constructed that promises to match ex-City partners with lawtech start-ups, to help them gain a foothold in large law firms with advice, contacts, and seed capital. The favoured model would see two investors each invest £50,000 in exchange for around 10% of the equity

The first and only lawyer to be ‘named and shamed’ by the Legal Ombudsman has been suspended from practice at the Bar for 14 months. Tariq Rehman was also prohibited from accepting or carrying out public access instructions for three years.

The majority at the employed Bar “do not feel supported or that their work is recognised”, both by the self-employed Bar and the Bar Council, research released yesterday by the latter has found. It said employed barristers enjoyed financial security, with average salaries around the £70,000 mark.

A “specialist paralegal law firm” has launched an alternative business structure that hopes to become a full service high street law practice. Having an ABS will enable the firm to undertake reserved work such as signing off the deed for family trusts and deeds of variation, and applying to the court for grants of probate.

Many client-care letters get the lawyer/client relationship off on the wrong foot, reinforcing preconceptions of lawyers’ letters as complex and difficult to read, and not providing the information that consumers actually want, new research has found.

The Legal Services Board has called on the Competition and Markets Authority to extend a study of comparison websites to include customer review sites, given their particular sensitivity in the legal market.

The solicitor who caused an uproar in June when he sent out a series of tweets appearing to gloat over defeating cases brought by parents of children with special educational needs and disability, has accepted a rebuke from the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

The Legal Ombudsman (LeO) is “some way off” handling complaints about unregulated legal services providers, the chief ombudsman has admitted. However, Kathryn Stone said it was “deeply frustrating” to LeO staff that consumers of unregulated services had no access to redress.

An online court should be introduced slowly and modestly rather than as ‘big bang’, according to one of the original architects of the dispute resolution model from which Lord Justice Briggs drew when devising his Civil Court Structure Review.