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Slater & Gordon has changed the strategy of the personal injury business it bought from Quindell and is now generally not accepting low-value road traffic accident accident claims that are more than a year old because they are harder to win, it has emerged.

The chief executive of what he terms a “bog standard law firm” has described how it secured private equity investment as a “roll-out specialist”. Colum Smith of McMillan Williams revealed that his firm received eight private equity funding offers.

The Bar Standards Board has accepted in principle all the recommendations of a hard-hitting report which found “highly variable” standards of advocacy in the youth courts. Only 52% of advocates thought they had sufficient knowledge of the youth justice system to do their job properly.

Cognitive computing could be used to suggest which arguments in court might play well or badly with a particular judge at a given time of day, according to a senior member of IBM’s Watson development team, although she outlined a number of more benign uses for the technology.

Lord Chancellor Michael Gove indicated yesterday that he would support legislative changes to make it easier to approve and regulate alternative business structures while the scope of the wider review of the Legal Services Act 2007 is worked out.

A report for the Council of Europe has argued that online dispute resolution and use of IT could improve access to justice by “offering solutions to the problems of judicial inefficiency, the high cost of litigation and geographical barriers”.

Top 20 accountancy firm Kingston Smith is expanding its commercial law services, the firm’s new head of legal services has said. Meanwhile, City firm Bates Wells Braithwaite, which became an alternative business structure last year to bring in an accountant to provide non-legal services, is evolving into a firm of business advisers, its managing partner said.

Solicitors who offer ‘unbundled’ legal advice to help litigants deal with challenging parts of the process provide an “invaluable” service to both the court and litigants, the Court of Appeal said yesterday. In a ruling that gave explicit backing to unbundling, the court refused to read broader responsibilities into a limited retainer.

Real separation of representative and regulatory functions at organisations like the Law Society and Bar Council is “unfinished business” of the Legal Services Act, according to the woman who led the society’s negotiations with the government in the run-up to the Act.

There are positive signs about improving consumer satisfaction with how they find, compare and then use law firms, major research by the Legal Services Consumer Panel has revealed. However, the panel said more vulnerable consumers “are potentially being left behind as those more empowered are able to take advantage of market changes”.