Barristers

Legal regulators have responded cautiously to the Competition and Markets Authority’s recommendations on price transparency, pledging to pilot regulatory requirements and test their effects on the lawyers and firms they regulate. They promised to implement controversial measures to encourage lawyers to publish prices if possible.

The Bar Standards Board has argued against extending the cab-rank rule to direct access work, on the grounds that access to justice would not improve, it might discourage them from taking instructions from the public, and may lead to clients invoking the rule inappropriately.

Law firm compliance officers and money laundering reporting officers have been scrambling to get to grips with the biggest shake-up in anti-money laundering rules in a decade, with the final regulations – which were only published on Thursday – coming into force today.

Bar students are struggling to understand ethical values because of the “massive memory test” awaiting them in the examination room, a senior lecturer has claimed. William Ralston, a former barrister, also questioned why anti-money laundering does not feature in the Bar professional training course exam.

Supreme Court judges should question the make-up of all-male teams of barristers appearing before the highest court in the land as their prevalence is damaging diversity in the profession, researchers have argued. The work highlighted the existence of homophily at the Supreme Court – the tendency of people to associate and bond with their own gender.

A direct access barrister has received his fifth suspension – for working during one of his previous suspensions. It comes as two barristers are disbarred after being jailed for fraud and the Solicitors Regulation Authority supports move to reduce the standard of proof at Bar disciplinary tribunals.

The case for excluding paid McKenzie Friends from the courts “has not yet been made out”, research for the Bar Council has concluded. The research found that most of the work carried out by paid McKenzie Friends was delivered outside court, and advocacy was merely “the tip of the iceberg”.

The Bar Standards Board is to review the role of the Inns of Court in the training of barristers, it has emerged. Among the issues are applying admission requirements, approving pupil supervisors, providing training courses for pupils and student discipline.

A ‘virtual’ chambers that supports direct access work has set up an alternative business structure, as has a niche financial services chambers, which become the second and third to be regulated by the Bar Standards Board. It licensed its first ABS, a collaboration between a London chambers and football agents, earlier this month.

Widespread change” is yet to happen at the Bar, with only a small minority of barristers planning to change the way they work or charge fees, a report for the Bar Standards Board has found. Despite the presence of “strong drivers for change”, the report said this did “not necessarily equate to a need or desire for a new approach”.