Practice Management

“Overwhelming disagreement” made the Solicitors Regulation Authority abandon a plan to make compliance officers sign declarations that their firms followed the accounts rules, it has emerged. But further changes to accountant’s reports are coming.

There is to be a drive to recruit retiring law firm partners to the senior judiciary in a bid to improve diversity, it has emerged. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, said he is looking at a “more sensible way” of recruiting partners who retire early onto the High Court bench.

The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that a TV medical negligence advert for Merseyside personal injury specialists Michael W Halsall Solicitors was “likely to cause undue distress to pregnant viewers”.

The turnover of SME law firms in London and South East rose by 4% this year, according to an annual benchmarking survey by accountants HW Fisher & Co. However, the survey warned that rising overheads would continue to put pressure on profits.

More than a million passengers travelling to and from UK airports are still to claim delayed flight compensation for last year alone, a survey has found. However, it suggested that passengers may prefer to claim compensation directly from airlines.

The Supreme Court has backed a law firm’s arguments that, following a breach of trust, it should have to pay in damages only the amount which the lender would have lost if the breach had not occurred.

Professor Avrom Sherr, one of the country’s leading legal academics, has said that “nobody listens to the Law Society” since it lost its regulatory role.

Legal education providers have warned that the possible introduction of a new, centralised assessment test for all would-be solicitors by the Solicitors Regulation Authority could be “a step back”.

Many of the 1,863 law firms e-mailed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority last Thursday that their apparent lack of professional indemnity insurance meant they would have to move into a period of shut-down had cover after all, it emerged.

Barrister entrepreneur William Rees has launched an online drafting service aimed at mainly at solicitors in small firms. The business provides “customised templates”, which aim to be more tailored to lawyers’ requirements and individual cases than traditional precedents.