Practice Management

Confusion among solicitors is the biggest challenge to the hours-free competence regime introduced by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, a survey has suggested. The second biggest challenge was that “solicitors think they won’t have to do any training”.

A ground-breaking legal ‘hackathon’ – pitting computer programmers against each other to reach the best solution to a legal technology problem in the space of a weekend – is to be held in London with the aim of generating technology that will assist law centres.

Law firms need to become “cuter” in their marketing as the ever increasing competition for work – particularly online – means that even recently established ways of operating are delivering diminishing returns, it has been claimed.

Lord Justice Briggs has set out radical plans to create an online court, which could become the compulsory starting point for money claims worth up to £25,000, and which would be designed “for use by litigants without lawyers”.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has voiced “serious doubts” over whether a solicitor, aged 79 and “with almost 50 years of exemplary service”, should have been referred to it for prosecution. Reginald Hemmings told the tribunal he found the experience “extremely distressing”.

The High Court has found a Newcastle law firm’s conduct an abuse of process after it repeatedly failed to pay the proper court fees when it issued claims. As a result, some of the professional negligence cases it was pursuing against another firm were time-barred.

A Midlands law firm making a claim for fees against former husband-and-wife clients has successfully applied for their £2.6m negligence counterclaim to be struck out. The court emphasised that a breach of fiduciary duty by a solicitor does not necessarily mean their entitlement to be paid is forfeited.

A counsellor and a tech entrepreneur are launching an app to help couples going through separation or divorce, and cut down on the need for lawyers and the amount spent on them. The first version of the ‘amicable app’ will go live at the end of March.

Automation by computers is unlikely to replace much of the work currently done by lawyers any time soon and the negative employment effects of technology have been overstated, according to a study.

Legal Beagles, a consumer rights forum, has launched a comparison website using its own research on fixed fees to decide which law firms are listed. Kate Briscoe, chief executive of Legal Beagles, said only around 500 firms published fixed fees on their websites.