Legal Services Act

A niche health and social care alternative business structure has incorporated as a public limited company as a prelude to a future expansion and stock exchange listing. Ridouts Solicitors has no immediate plans to become a listed company but was getting it “ducks in a row” so as to be ready for when it happens.

The move to move Kent County Council’s legal team into an alternative business structure (ABS) is now well underway, with a white-label service to private law firms for routine work likely to be part of its offering, Legal Futures can reveal.

Slater & Gordon’s core UK business lost A$64m (£37m) in the year to 30 June 2016, while it spent A$33m on reorganising operations over here, the listed firm’s annual results have revealed. The company had already prepared the market for the group’s headline loss of A$1.02bn but still its shares fell 15% in trading.

A solicitor who oversaw “financial chaos” in his practice has been suspended, with a tribunal imposing conditions on his return to the profession in the future to ensure he does not hold a management position. He was also sanctioned for failing to co-operate with the Legal Ombudsman.

A lawyer-matching service for SMEs has raised £50,000 in less than three days as it bids to crowdfund £360,000 for the next stage of its development. LawyerFair told potential investors that “legal services are an inefficient, low innovation marketplace” and that within three years it would be turning over £4.6m.

The Legal Services Board has fired a warning shot across the bows of the Law Society in the wake of the latter’s decision to spend £61m over four years on new IT systems for both its representative and regulatory arms.

Slater & Gordon has seen its performance improve significantly in the first half of 2016 – with changes in the UK starting “to bear fruit” – and its upcoming annual results will show that the acquisition of Quindell’s professional services division has nearly doubled its turnover.

Family law specialists should be required to work under fixed fees, the Legal Services Consumer Panel has suggested as it ramped up its call for regulatory intervention to improve transparency in the market. It said family law was one area where it advised that regulators “should now consider mandating fixed fees”.

The uncertainties around the personal injury reforms in England and Wales has caused Australia’s ‘other’ listed law firm to row back on plans to enter the market. Shine Lawyers, a leading personal injury practice, has been talking about expanding to the UK, but in its 2016 annual report indicated that these are on hold.

The Competition and Market Authority was right to conclude that there needs to be more transparency of price and service quality in the legal market, the Legal Services Board said today. But this has to be combined with both short and long-term regulatory reform.