Barristers

A barrister who was disbarred after the Employment Appeal Tribunal made a ‘restriction of proceedings’ order to prevent him bringing further vexatious claims, has had his appeal to the High Court rejected.

More serious criminal defence work should be restricted to barristers, and solicitor-advocates who want to do it should have to requalify, the former Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, has suggested. He also called for a “higher-quality filter” for those wanting to become barristers and reiterated his support for a levy on City law firms to aid those less fortunate.

Privately educated people still dominate the legal profession, with barriers to entry for those from less affluent backgrounds are even more acute at the Bar than among solicitors, the Social Mobility Commission said yesterday.

Barristers are set to pay 10% extra for their practising certificates for the next decade, first to plug a multi-million pound hole in the Bar Council’s pension fund and then to buy it out and remove all future liabilities.

A solicitor in debt to HM Revenue & Customs who supplied legal services without complying with a condition that he had first to give the taxman security for the VAT, has been rebuked by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

The first and only lawyer to be ‘named and shamed’ by the Legal Ombudsman has been suspended from practice at the Bar for 14 months. Tariq Rehman was also prohibited from accepting or carrying out public access instructions for three years.

A barrister who sent out a series of anti-semitic and racist tweets has been disbarred by a Bar disciplinary tribunal. The tweets by unregistered barrister Ian Millard in November 2014 were found to be “seriously offensive”. He has also been reported to the police.

The Ministry of Justice has no intention of dropping its plans to separate the legal regulators from their representative bodies, it said yesterday as it unveiled reviews of how the Legal Services Board and Legal Ombudsman are operating.

The Bar has nothing to fear from an online court, but it must take direct access “seriously”, Lord Justice Briggs has said. In particular, he said, the young Bar, which “excels” in providing a “competitive” service, would be well placed to play its part in the new court.

The Bar’s regulator will take a “cautious” approach to licencing alternative business structures (ABSs) and look closely at non-lawyer owners to ensure no “naughty” behaviour, but said over the weekend that there is strong interest in the possibilities on offer.

Lawyers who don’t believe the “writing is on the wall” that unregulated legal services will increase “may find themselves on the wrong side of history”, the founder of direct access website Absolute Barrister has warned. He advised barristers to focus on their legal expertise more broadly, rather than advocacy skills.

Outer Temple Chambers has taken the unprecedented step of setting up what is effectively a separate international law firm, employing a solicitor. Outer Temple International, a Bar Standards Board-regulated entity, has now secured insurance and is set to go live this week.

Significant numbers of new advocates are “weaker than might be hoped on basic knowledge” of ethical rules, a major report has found. The report also found that ethics training before and after qualification was “insufficiently robust or frequent to enable confident ethical practice amongst new advocates”.

The Bar Standards Board has backed a more flexible, outcomes-based continuing professional development regime, despite the fears of some board members that it would degenerate into a “paper exercise”. The move follows a consultation exercise to which only one individual barrister, along with six organisations, responded.

A solicitor who made multiple complaints against two barristers who acted for the claimant in litigation in which he was a defendant, has failed in an application to judicially review the Bar Standards Board’s (BSB) decision to dismiss the complaints.