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Real benefits are emerging from alternative business structures and the US should be open-minded about adopting them, according to an academic study. It found that while ABSs did not amount to a transformation of the industry, their effects on the firms in England and Wales that adopted the business model were positive.

PowerPoint slides prepared by external counsel for training at the Ministry of Justice were subject to legal professional privilege and did not have to be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, the First-Tier Tribunal has ruled.

The introduction of entity regulation has had the unintended effect of “insourcing” professional obligations to specialist compliance staff, leaving knowledge among City lawyers of the SRA Handbook “very poor”, a leading legal academic has found as part of a major government-funded project.

Commercial pressures on barristers are causing high risk behaviours that are detectable in complaints received by the Bar Standards Board, an assessment of future regulatory dangers has revealed. It also highlighted what it claimed were indications that senior barristers were abusing their position of power over women, pupils, and junior barristers.

Essex Legal Services has become just the fourth local authority legal department to become an alternative business structure. The legal department of Essex County Council predicted that it could make an additional surplus of £1.8m by 2020 through a “growth strategy” with creation of the ABS as “one of the key enablers”.

Not involving expert conveyancers sufficiently was one of several fundamental failings that led to the collapse of the Law Society’s Veyo project, which has cost solicitors £7m, a review has concluded. External consultants said there was not one single decision or mistake which resulted in Veyo’s demise.

There is a serious lack of transparency over the pricing of common legal services, major new research has found – with those providers who do publish their rates and also the ones who offer fixed fees generally cheaper than law firms that do not.

Two new alternative business structures are set for approval next week, as the Leeds-based Progeny Group comes into life. The group will combine a commercial law and private client ABS with a separate, FCA-regulated wealth management business.

A former senior partner who charged clients for work that had not been done has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. The tribunal described the harm caused by David Michael Merrick, who had been a partner at Exeter firm Crosse & Crosse, as being “of the utmost seriousness”.

The High Court has rejected a bid by a would-be barrister to lift a decade-old declaration that she was a vexatious litigant, which she said was harming her prospects of becoming a lawyer. She has previously unsuccessfully sued the Law Society and College of Law dozens of times between them for alleged discrimination.