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A team of computer coding specialists from magic circle firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer have won a groundbreaking ‘hackathon’ to create an IT-based product of use to Hackney Law Centre, with a multi-lingual access to justice website built from scratch in just 24 hours.

NAHL Group plc – the AIM-listed business that owns National Accident Helpline – has announced strong results for 2015, but warned that impending government reforms to personal injury (PI) claims are likely to hit profits in the current financial year. Meanwhile, the SRA has issued a warning notice about PI fraud.

There is a big gap in the way partners and fee-earners at medium-sized law firms view where they work, including “an exaggerated sense of progressiveness among decision-makers”, a new report has found. Partners were far more confident than fee-earners that their firm had a “clear strategy for the future”.

Two former clients of Suffolk law firm Gotelee who were only awarded £250 in damages after a finding of negligence have failed in their bid to increase this to £100,000. The firm admitted that it negligently failed to advise the developer claimants that there was a planning restriction attached to a property they bought.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has criticised the Solicitors Regulation Authority after quashing restrictions and disciplinary sanctions the regulator had imposed on an immigration caseworker. The ruling is one of the few successful challenges to the SRA’s disciplinary decision-making.

Two directors of collapsed Devon law firm Recompense, Carolyn Hales and Irene Webb, have admitted allowing its client account to be used as a banking facility following agreements with the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Matthew Roddan, a third director of the firm, is on his way to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

Plans by the Bar Standards Board to introduce a more flexible, outcomes-focused CPD scheme have met with widespread opposition from barristers. Only two of the proposals in its latest consultation received a positive response from individual barristers, while the Chancery Bar Association and Inns of Court expressed concerns

The battle for the future of legal regulation is set to move into high gear next week with publication of the government consultation on making regulators such as the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board fully independent of the representative bodies which technically oversee them.

A registered foreign lawyer, whose mortgage frauds over a matter of weeks have cost the SRA Compensation Fund almost £2.5m so far, has been struck off the register. But the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal said his fellow director was “as much a victim as the parties who were subject to the fraudulent transactions”.

The government has agreed that insolvency practitioners should no longer be regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. It said a reduction in the number of regulators would promote “consistency and efficiency” and “could reduce the overall cost of regulation which would ultimately benefit creditors”.