Getting to grips with COLPs and COFAs
Frank Maher, a partner at Liverpool law firm Legal Risk LLP, outlines the new requirements on law firms to appoint compliance officers and the difficult issues they raise for practices in choosing who to appoint and the extent of the role.
Legal Pioneers: Parabis – the innovative group eyeing up private equity investment
In the second instalment of our new Legal Pioneers series, we profile Parabis, which currently operates as a co-operative of different insurance-related regulated companies. When the Legal Services Act goes lives, however, integration of legal and non-legal functions and external investment are on the horizon.
Legal Pioneers: MTA Solicitors – the most diverse legal practice in the UK?
Legal Pioneers is a major new Legal Futures series profiling innovative legal services providers. In the first instalment, Neil Rose travels to Bromley in Kent to visit MTA Solicitors, which has three different legal practices, a shopping centre store, and nine (soon to be 10) other ancilliary businesses.
Safe hands: why the paralegal work-based learning graduates are fit to be solicitors
Jane Ching, Reader at Nottingham Law School, outlines its experience of running the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s work-based learning pilot that offered a route to qualification as a solicitor for those working as paralegals.
Abandon hope – but not your firm
Recent figures from the Solicitors Regulation Authority suggest that the number of law firms being abandoned is on the rise, with abandonment reports at their highest level since 2008. Joanne Wright outlines the options facing solicitors who want to shut up shop.
