Practice Management

The market for professional indemnity insurance is likely to continue to worsen but future premium rises should not be at the average of 17% seen this autumn, a leading broker has predicted.

A government-backed body is directing funds towards AI products that it hopes will help make the UK the world’s leading developer of high-tech innovations in legal services.

There was no implied retainer between a businessman who found himself on the wrong end of an expensive short-term loan and the law firm acting for the lender, the High Court has ruled.

Four-fifths of legal aid lawyers have experienced stress as a result of the pandemic, with more than half of them blaming longer working hours, according to a survey.

A global law firm is trialling a workflow app developed by one of its associates, who says it could save City practices up to £6m a year by making work allocation more efficient.

The Lord Chief Justice told MPs yesterday that he is “extremely concerned” that the backlogs that have grown across the justice system since March should not be “viewed by anybody as the new normal”.

Law firm Shakespeare Martineau has become the first major business to sign up to a ‘Fair Redundancy Pledge’ to be transparent on their redundancy programmes for this year and beyond.

The High Court has refused to aggregate as one claim various actions a Yorkshire law firm’s indemnity insurer is facing because of a multi-million pound fraud run by one of its partners.

Law firms have been urged to change their retainers now so they can charge clients for holding their money, given the “possibility, if not likelihood” of negative interest rates.

Negligent conveyancers should not be able to avoid liability because it emerges later that their client was engaged in mortgage fraud, the Supreme Court has ruled.

The Covid-19 pandemic risks the huge progress made in using technology to innovate in legal services and find new ways of working, according to a report from the City of London Corporation.

Minster Law has become the first major personal injury practice to state that it is ready for next year’s whiplash reforms by formally launching its self-service digital claims portal.

Lawtech start-ups set up solely by lawyers grow more slowly than those that with coders among the founders, research by Oxford University has found.

The new way of qualifying as a solicitor, including passing a centralised, two-part examination, will go live from 1 September 2021 after the Legal Services Board approved the reforms.

Four in ten parents who have been involved in a remote family hearing say they did not understand it, a major study has discovered. The president of the Family Division said this was “worrying”.