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Friday’s Competition and Markets Authority report on legal services has reignited the debate over independent regulation, with both the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board welcoming the call for separation from their representative bodies.

Some 1,053 barristers from across the United Kingdom have signed a letter to Prime Minister David Cameron calling for an Act of Parliament before any decision is made to leave the European Union. The barristers also said that any Act should be preceded by a free vote.

Competition in legal services for individual and small business consumers is not working as well as it might, with lack of transparency over price and service the main problem, the provisional report of the Competition and Markets Authority has found.

The “grandiloquent, rhetorical and at times almost facetious” advocacy style of a criminal defence barrister has no place in modern trials, the Court of Appeal has said. It found the barrister “certainly appears to take a considerable degree of satisfaction in having a style all of his own”.

The Lord Chief Justice has revived Lord Bingham’s call for criminal law to be codified in a single document. Among the arguments put forward by Lord Thomas were there were fewer criminal law specialists as expertise was “increasingly diverted elsewhere”.

The government is today laying out plans to remove restrictions on alternative business structures (ABSs) on the basis that they have proven no more risky than traditional law firms. However, it has delayed publication of the consultation on the independence of legal regulators from representative bodies.

An academic audit of a law firm’s business has broken down its offering into more than 300 ‘products’ as part of a radical and so far successful attempt to increase profits. It was carried out under a government-backed knowledge transfer partnership with Oxford Brookes University’s business school.

A sole practitioner who “simply buried his head in the sand” over his failure to secure indemnity insurance and carry out an orderly wind-down of his firm has been reprimanded by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has banned a paralegal at an alternative business structure and a trainee solicitor at former Hull firm Ward Legal from working for law firms. The SRA said the paralegal sent e-mails to his partner at another law firm making comments that “failed to encourage equality of opportunity and respect for diversity”.

The High Court has imposed an extended civil restraint order on an “obsessional” libel litigant who sent over 100 text messages to the mobile phone of a partner at Pinsent Masons acting for Google UK. She also made complaints to professional bodies.