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Gateley has made its first acquisition as a listed company, using shares to finance part of the £2.7m purchase of specialist tax incentives advisory business Capitus. The business, which is to be renamed Gateley Capitus, made a £593,000 profit on a £1.38m turnover in its last financial year.

A solicitor who charged one client 50 times the estimate of £2,000 and another £100,000 in fees on a probate matter on which he could “recall no detail at all”, has been struck off by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. The SDT said Edgar Thomas had “blatantly abused his position of trust in the most despicable way”.

A new not-for-profit personal injury marketing collective with 20 law firms stumping up £600,000 each to create a £12m budget is set to go live shortly in a bid to disrupt the market. The collective has been put together with well-known legal digital marketing agency mmadigital.

The Legal Services Board gives the impression that it values innovation and market development above all things, including “the necessary protective role of regulation” when it goes wrong, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has said.

Public Interest Lawyers confirmed yesterday that the Solicitors Regulation Authority has decided to refer it to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal over the Al-Sweady inquiry. It followed the SRA’s announcement in the morning that it had referred an unnamed firm to the tribunal, having earlier this year named Leigh Day as the first.

Co-operative Legal Services returned to profit last year, although turnover continued to fall, its annual results have revealed. Though turnover – which reached a high of £33m in 2012 – was down a further 14% to £18m, CLS turned a £5m loss into a £700,000 profit.

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.