Market monitor

Listed law firm Gateley has hit the acquisition trail once more, spending £3.4m on another HR business to help create “one of the largest specialist human capital consultancy businesses in the UK”.

Twenty four members of staff at Just Costs Solicitors, which went into administration in January, have won an employment tribunal claim for unpaid wages.

City law firms are set for a “boom in Brexit-related advisory work” as the UK’s future relationship with the EU becomes clearer, an authoritative analysis has predicted.

McKenzie Friends are giving “biased and misleading” advice to vulnerable family litigants, an academic study of online posts has found. It found “many negative attitudes expressed towards lawyers”.

DWF is to make the biggest acquisition by a listed law firm to date by spending more than £40m on a leading Spanish practice. The news came as the firm announced positive half-year results.

Women not being instructed in the best cases and “traditional assumptions about who gets what sort of judging job” are the main reasons for there being relatively few in the senior judiciary, Lady Hale has argued.

A solicitor specialising in contentious probate – and the first to become a specialist private client mediator with CEDR – has launched a private client mediation and conflict coaching business.

A City law firm that describes itself as an asset management consultancy, providing a wide range of services to alternative fund managers and asset owners, has notified its intention to float on AIM.

There is no basis for a law firm’s challenge to a Legal Aid Agency decision to reject its tender for a legal aid contract, the High Court has ruled.

Well-known criminal law firm Kaim Todner closed its doors yesterday after One Legal – the alternative business structure that owns it – was put into voluntary liquidation.

A start-up aiming to give home buyers access to all the information on their move via an app is set to launch a pilot with several leading software providers – and through them law firms.

The “ageism” of new-breed ‘virtual’ law firms, with their focus on senior lawyers at the expense of younger ones, has not been confronted, an analysis has argued.

A “growing number of insurers” believe there will not be enough time for them to prepare properly for launch of the whiplash portal in April 2020, the new head of FOIL has warned. One said it was “impossible”.

Most of the large Irish law firms have been approached about a merger with a UK counterpart in the past year as City firms look to establish a foothold in the post-Brexit EU, it has emerged.

Investors are poised to buy into the legal services sector to capitalise on recent regulatory changes, with corporatised law firms best placed to benefit, according to an expert in external investment.