News

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The three main professional bodies have all set out their stalls against lawyers being “named and shamed” if found guilty by the Legal Ombudsman (LeO) of providing an inadequate service. The Bar Council has this week joined the Law Society and Institute of Legal Executives in criticising the idea.

International law firms face growing threats to their share of the global legal market over the next decade, with likely challenges from Chinese firms, future market crashes and protectionism high on the agenda, a major new report has predicted.

Some of the UK’s leading legal brains – including Professor Richard Susskind and Legal Services Board chief executive Chris Kenny – are teaming up with six law schools in England, the US and China to launch a groundbreaking international legal education project in London this weekend. LawWithoutWalls claims to be the first global venture designed to tackle the problems facing legal education and practice by bridging law schools, students, legal and business professionals, and entrepreneurs.

Seven law firms have joined the second wave of the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s (SRA) relationship management (RM) pilot. RM may be one of the ways the SRA supervises firms according to its assessment of the risks the firm poses as part of outcomes-focused regulation, which goes live in October.

Senior managers at the Legal Services Board (LSB) earn between £80,000 and £120,000, it has emerged in data released under the government’s transparency agenda. The LSB is funded by a levy on the eight legal professions it oversees, and the top-paid senior managers under chief executive Chris Kenny are general counsel Bruce Macmillian, paid between £115,000 and £120,000, and strategy director, Crispin Passmore (£110,000 and £115,000).

Solicitors have had to cover £15m in unpaid premiums of law firms that have been in the assigned risks pool (ARP) during its first 10 years, it has emerged. Of that, £6.1m is for run-off cover for firms that closed without insurance, and the figures reveal that the Solicitors Regulation Authority has collected just £500,000 in run-off premiums since the ARP was set up in 2000.

Alternative ways of delivering legal services continue to grow with the launch of two web-based, fixed-fee Q&A services, and what is claimed to be the first Twitter “law firm”. The two websites – www.expert-answers.co.uk and www.questiontheexpert.com – both use panels of qualified lawyers to answer questions put by users, while @thelegaloracle is the brainchild of the founder of personal injury referral network Loyalty Law.

The Legal Services Board is explicitly threatening the Solicitors Regulation Authority, Bar Standards Board and ILEX Professional Standards with using its formal enforcement powers for the first time over their quality assurance for advocates scheme, Legal Futures can reveal. The regulators have branded the move as neither “helpful nor necessary”.

One of the country’s leading volume conveyancing firms has gone into administration following the abolition of home information packs, Legal Futures can reveal. While Fridays Property Lawyers Ltd – a licensed conveyancing firm which recently began offering probate services too – has been sold in a pre-packaged sale, there have been an unknown number of redundancies.

Three-quarters of lawyers who sought help with health problems last year complained of stress, support charity LawCare has reported, while warning that drug abuse in the profession is worse than its statistics indicate. LawCare opened 517 new case files in 2010, down from a record 549 in 2009, splitting 60/40 between women and men.