Legal Services Act

The latest personal injury law firm to become an alternative business structure is eyeing up the opportunity of offering insurers a specialist white-label service, it has emerged. Without the status, “you can’t get off the starting blocks,” said its chief executive.

Mid-sized law firms are looking more likely to secure mergers in the coming months than their smaller brethren, new research has indicated. The survey of 92 firms found that most of the firms that had received or made multiple approaches had at least 10 partners.

Evident Legal, the law firm franchise turned online legal service Simplify the Law, has secured a cash injection from a venture capitalist to help it grow. The investor, ARC InterCapital, was set up by former Goldman Sachs vice-president Andrew Dixon.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is again lobbying the government to raise the amount it can fine traditional law firms after its previous attempt to catapult the limit from £2,000 to £250m was rejected last autumn. The revelation came in a consultation on proposed fining guidelines.

A law firm that has innovative web-based personal injury brands, including those directed at the building trades and taxi drivers, is to investigate external investment after winning its alternative business structure (ABS) license.

Admiral Insurance and national law firm Lyons Davidson – which received its alternative business structure licence in November – are having talks about linking up, but it will not involve the law firm being acquired, Legal Futures can report.

Legal regulators have failed to open up their professional registers containing disciplinary information to price comparison websites, despite having been instructed to do so by the Legal Services Board, the Legal Services Consumer Panel has complained.

The Bar has clashed with academics calling for an end to the cab-rank rule over whether the problem of finding lawyers to represent the accused in the recent Delhi rape and murder case is proof of the rule’s continuing value.

The government does not intend to extend legal professional privilege to non-lawyers, the Ministry of Justice confirmed yesterday after accountants urged Parliament to level the playing field for multi-disciplinary entities.

The cab-rank rule is ineffective and should be removed from the barristers’ code of conduct – and instead applied as a principle to all providers of legal services, including alternative business structures – a report published today has urged.

A new marketing collective that is targeting consumer and commercial legal work – Simply Lawyers – is preparing for launch, Legal Futures can reveal. Meanwhile, Accidents Direct hopes to become the country’s leading claims management company by bringing more firms onto its panel.

The Legal Services Board and Legal Services Consumer Panel have thrown their weight behind Friday’s Office of Fair Trading report that urged continuing simplification of the regulatory regime for lawyers, particularly around complaints.

Regulators need to speed up their processes for approving alternative business structures, the Office of Fair Trading said today. It also called for further simplification of the complaints system, recommended actions to increase the number of available pupillages and gave cautious support for the move away from title-based regulation.

Not all alternative business structure applicants have understood what is required of them, which in part explains delays in approving some licences, the chief executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority has said in a robust defence of the regulator’s performance that also dealt with compliance officer approvals.

The millionaire co-founder of Betfair – the world’s largest betting exchange – is the principal investor behind new alternative business structure Brilliant Law, it has emerged. Brilliant Law said it is the UK’s first law firm set up by non-lawyers, a team “renowned for challenging the markets within which they operate”