Legal Services Act

The first alternative business structure licensed by the Bar Standards Board – a combination of barristers and football agents – has shut down, Legal Futures can reveal.

Global law company Elevate – which bought UK law firm Halebury earlier this year – has secured a $25m (£20m) minority investment as it continues to scale up.

The Legal Services Board is set to begin work on a a review of continuing competence that will revisit the possibility of formal periodic reaccreditation for lawyers.

Eversheds Sutherland is to hive off three of its ‘alternative’ legal services teams into an alternative business structure, from which it will seek external investment to help more than double revenue to £100m.

The former head of operations at well-known media law firm Schillings has been banned from working for solicitors after reselling the firm’s used mobile phones and pocketing the proceeds.

An accountancy firm in Cornwall has set up an alternative business structure to provide will writing, trusts and power of attorney services – which it says is the first one-stop shop of its kind in the county.

Both the claimant and defendant representatives have expressed frustration with the progress of the government’s whiplash reforms, and doubted it will be ready for April 2020 as planned.

General counsel need to embrace technology and innovate in a “seismic” way if they are to endure an increasing bright spotlight from businesses eager to reduce their costs, a report from EY has argued.

Law firms need to become “fluid” and drop traditional resistance to opening themselves to outside talent, with an employed layer of project managers hiring freelance lawyers on a project-by-project basis.

Insurers will start pricing in savings from the whiplash reforms this year, even though the changes may be delayed until late 2020, new research has predicted.