Practice Management

A law firm has lost more than £100,000 from a property transaction after falling for an e-mail scam, it has been reported. It comes as a conveyancer who had already been convicted of fraud and banned from working in law firms has been convicted again after defrauding three firms where she secured employment after changing her name.

The Law Society abused its dominant position by requiring over 3,000 law firms to buy its own training in order to maintain their Conveyancing Quality Scheme accreditation, the Competition Appeal Tribunal has ruled. It is likely that the case will cost the society at least £1m.

The Legal Services Board has dismissed concerns about the “negative” impact of its requirement that lawyers tell clients about their complaints procedures before any work has been done. Research found “negative reactions” to the prominence of this information but the board said the problem was how some lawyers have chosen to provide it.

HM Land Registry plans to live test a ‘Digital Street’ scheme which will enable the “almost instant” transfer of property ownership, backed by technology including blockchain – the secure distributed ledger underpinning the Bitcoin currency – it has emerged.

The Lord Chief Justice has signalled concerns about the impending reform to educating law students, saying that a “very broadly based legal education” and law schools “as the centres of excellence” must not be diluted. Lord Thomas said the start of a legal career “must be at law school”.

In-house lawyers have been significantly slower to adopt technology than their counterparts in business, according to a prominent legal technology innovator. Former in-house lawyer D Casey Flaherty, an advisor to Dentons’ lawtech incubator NextLaw Labs, said lawyers as a group were “reluctant” to embrace technology

Appeal judges have rejected the pleas of a claimant who, faced by two law firms with similar names set up by the same solicitor, sued the wrong one. The court heard how Godfrey Morgan Solicitors and Godfrey Morgan Solicitors Limited were run “in parallel, as distinct businesses”.

The technology incubator of London law firm and alternative business structure Mishcon de Reya has chosen six lawtech companies for investment from a shortlist of 19 startups that pitched last month. Two are based in the UK, with the remainder coming from Germany, the US, and India.

In-house lawyers have ranked responsiveness and understanding of their businesses above price as the qualities they most look for when choosing external law firms. One legal counsel at an investment fund said he was “shocked at the poor service we sometimes get” and “often dumbfounded by the poor level of responsiveness”.

A virtual law firm, Keystone Law, has beaten the big players to achieve the highest “success rate” in litigation in the senior courts, a report has found. Data analysts Premonition also said litigants in person were more successful in winning cases as a group than the profession, as it robustly defended its quantitative approach to recording the performance of lawyers.