Latest news

Your Legal Friend, a trading name of Liverpool law firm Camps Solicitors, has confirmed that it has launched its long-awaited shareholder group action against Quindell plc.

A company set up by a senior solicitor to be a member of his firm’s limited liability partnership can be the victim of age discrimination, the president of the Employment Appeal Tribunal has ruled. It is believed to be the first discrimination case brought by a company.

At a time when “the cost of legal services has generally been allowed to rise to unsustainable levels”, lawyers and the clients need to reconnect the four key ingredients that go into the purchase of legal services – cost, price, value and relationship – Professor Stephen Mayson has argued.

The High Court has overturned fines imposed on two solicitors for their involvement in stamp duty land tax avoidance schemes, saying that their conduct deserved more severe punishment. It said the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal had “seriously underestimated the gravity of its own findings”.

One of the country’s leading local government innovators has told his council that “in future, we will no longer have a legal business that happens to use technology. Instead, it will be a digital business that happens to do law”. He also said that public sector lawyers have a “greater duty than most” to address the country’s access to justice deficit.

A Canadian report on alternative business structures has issued a cautious verdict on majority non-lawyer ownership, judging the model to be as yet unproven, based on the experience so far in England and Wales and Australia.

The shareholders who sold national law firm Simpson Millar to Fairpoint Group plc in June 2014 have received their full £3m earn-out after the practice exceeded its first-year financial targets. Fairpoint paid an initial £7m in cash – on a debt-free, cash-free basis – and 1.4m shares in the group.

Legal services would be more heavily affected than the UK economy as a whole should the country withdraw from the European Union, groundbreaking research commissioned by the Law Society has predicted.

Bates Wells & Braithwaite has become the first UK law firm to gain ‘B Corporation’ certification to mark its social and environmental performance, and as part of the process had to amend its LLP deed to provide that the firm is not just run for the benefit of the partners.

A barristers’ chambers is set to launch an alternative business structure to help it obtain international work, because it will give the appearance of a solicitors’ firm to foreign clients who do not understand direct access.