Barristers

Barristers will soon be able to offer a full range of legal services after the Bar Council unveiled a third-party escrow account which will hold client money. All funds are to be held in a ring-fenced account with Barclays.

The Bar Standards Board has suggested changing the benchmark for measuring how its complaints investigators are performing – after it failed badly to meet its own key performance indicators.

The Bar Standards Board is to boost its use of social media to rebut future negative publicity, after a bruising encounter with conventional news media in the wake of the ongoing controversy over barristers’ disciplinary tribunals.

The chairman of the Bar Council has called for a last stand against several “objectionable” elements of the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates or else they will form part of similar schemes planned for all areas of legal practice.

The first barrister to become a partner in a legal disciplinary practice has overturned a disciplinary tribunal ruling that she conducted litigation in breach of the Bar’s code of conduct, with both the tribunal and the Bar Standards Board coming in for criticism.

The Bar Standards Board is to accept that some barristers should have disciplinary findings against them overturned because of “anomalies” in the constitution of the tribunal panel which made the decision, it has emerged.

The system for training lawyers is not fit for purpose, the Legal Education and Training Review research team has suggested. The team of academics floated a series of ideas that in some instances would represent radical reform of the present regime.

Ian Dodd of the Bar Consultancy Network responds to our article earlier this week on the apparent disappearance of the ProcureCo concept a little over two years after the Bar Council launched it with great fanfare.

Remember the ProcureCo? Most have forgotten this corporate bolt-on to chambers, little more than two years after it was launched. We asked the Bar Council what happened to its big idea.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board have been warned to improve the way they regulate immigration practitioners or risk enforcement action by the Legal Services Board – including the ultimate sanction of losing their ability to regulate the area at all.

Standard contractual terms between solicitors and barristers are set to become a reality at long last after the Legal Services Board approved controversial changes to the cab-rank rule that will underpin them – albeit with some reluctance.

There is a “small but material rate of non-compliance” by solicitors with their complaints-handling requirements – and some bad attitudes towards complaints – confidential research by the Solictors Regulation Authority has found.

There have been “systemic failures” in the administration of the Bar’s disciplinary tribunals dating back several years, a damning report has found. A review group has issued 82 recommendations to establish a new tribunal service.

rtesian Law, the groundbreaking SRA-regulated law firm set up by six junior criminal law barristers, has named Bryan Cox QC as its first associate member. Mr Cox is a tenant of New Park Court Chambers in Leeds.

Competition between solicitors and barristers is to step up a gear with Bar Standards Board plans to allow counsel with less than three years’ practising experience – so-called ‘baby barristers’ – to start accepting public access instructions.