Practice Management

Fee income per partner at larger firms soared last year from an average of £777,000 to almost £1.4m, a survey has found. Accountants MHA, who produce an annual benchmarking report, said the main reason was a fall in the number of equity partners at these firms, helped by an increase in profitable work.

A leading City law firm has failed to persuade the Court of Appeal to overturn a ruling that it was negligent in failing to highlight a major development planned to take place near a £26m residential property whose purchase it was handling.

Two leading lawtech organisations have linked with the judiciary to stage a hackathon which will develop tools aimed at assisting the online court, it has emerged. The Society for Computers and Law, London lawtech community Legal Geek, and the Judiciary of England and Wales, will jointly host the event on 1-2 July.

A contract review technology company incubated by Cambridge-based law firm Taylor Vinters has raised more than $1m in its latest funding round, with investors including former Vodafone UK CEO Guy Laurence, and Michael Findlay, chairman of Morgan Sindall and former co-head of investment banking for Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

The Government Legal Service discriminated against a law graduate with Asperger’s Syndrome by refusing to make reasonable adjustments when she took a test that forms part of the application process for training contracts, the Employment Appeal Tribunal has found.

Lawyers are the not the only ones blocking innovation in larger law firms, the head of IT at DLA Piper has said, highlighting also the need to decentralise responsibility for innovation and allowing it to happen in individual practice groups.

The cost of conveyancing has risen 37% over the past decade, greater than the overall rise in the cost of moving home, new research has found. But it remains a relatively small proportion of the overall cost of moving home, however, which was put at £9,472 – although this was considerably more than people budgeted for.

A legal tech start-up has won funding from the country’s leading social tech funder to help develop its speech-to-text tool, which also uses IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence (AI) system, so that it can be used in courts. Meanwhile, Dentons’ business accelerator has made its latest investment in an “AI-powered expertise finding platform”.

The training reforms unveiled last week by the Solicitors Regulation Authority are “not a panacea for diversity” though they could make a “significant contribution”, a report for the regulator has concluded. The report also warned that the arrival of the solicitors qualifying examination in 2020 would make the training market “more complex to navigate”.

The Court of Appeal has overturned a ruling that Raleys – the controversial but now defunct Barnsley law firm – should not have to compensate a miner who argued that its admitted negligence had caused him to settle a claim at an undervalue. Otherwise, it would be “far too easy for negligent solicitors to raise huge obstacles to claimants”.