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A former City solicitor has been appointed as the new chief executive of the Legal Services Board – the first lawyer to hold the post. Neil Buckley, who spent eight years at Sinclair Roche & Temperley (now part of Stephenson Harwood), joins in January from Ofcom.

Solicitors who refer consumers to their unregulated businesses under the revised separate business rule may obtain consent to do so, but there is a serious risk that it will not be informed, a member of the Legal Services Consumer Panel has warned.

Law firms are failing to unify the different generations within their workforces and are suffering as a result, research has suggested. It said there need to be formal programmes within firms that get the different generations talking and working together.

A solicitor who failed to issue proceedings, fabricated settlement offers and paid clients “compensation” from his own money has been struck off. Mark Davies told the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal that some clients may have benefited from his actions.

A local authority legal department which recently warned that council lawyers are being forced to set up alternative business structures by restrictive rules on in-house practice, has won backing to do just that. Essex Legal Services predicted that it could make an additional surplus of £1.8m by 2020.

Widespread failure to comply with diversity rules, cash-flow problems, disguised referral fees and fraud have all been revealed in a Bar Standards Board report on “high impact” chambers. Few chambers also bothered to get feedback from lay clients.

Mergers have been unveiled across the country in recent days, with firms of all sizes and practice areas choosing to join forces. There is usually a rush of mergers each year timed to coincide with the 30 September deadline to secure professional indemnity insurance, and 2015 has proven no different.

Any short-term “bonanza” in legal work triggered by Britain’s exit from the EU would be followed by a drought, City lawyers have warned in a report by the Law Society. The society highlighted the impact on England and Wales as a centre of international dispute resolution.

Only 13% of small businesses believe lawyers “provide a cost-effective means to resolve legal issues”, the biggest survey of its kind has found. The survey also found that small businesses were more likely to use accountants in solving legal problems than solicitors.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has decided not to grade itself as ‘good’ or ‘satisfactory’ in a self-assessment exercise for the Legal Services Board. Chief executive Paul Philip told a board meeting yesterday that the SRA had chosen to respond “in a humble way” rather than stressing its achievements.