Practice Management

The prospect of paying referral fees in personal injury becoming a criminal offence seemingly disappeared last night, while the government defeated a bid to exempt not-for-profits from the ban and outlined its plans to crack down on unsolicited PI marketing.

Innovative legal business Axiom has become the latest to open an operation in Belfast, with £1.6m of government support. Unlike at other law firm operations in the city, the 100 lawyers and paralegals will be the primary client-facing fee-earners for global companies.

Mid-tier law firms are over-engineering their risk management and compliance functions, spending more than both bigger and smaller practices for far less return, new research from Lockton has claimed.

The Legal Services Consumer Panel has called upon the ongoing Legal Education and Training Review to propose a revalidation scheme for lawyers. At the same event, delegates were told that judicial evaluation in the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates is flawed.

Regulators should empower consumers to drive improvements in the quality of legal services, while professional indemnity insurers could hand over firm-specific claims data to help target poorly performing practices, the Legal Services Board has suggested.

More common training of would-be lawyers, sector-wide CPD, and scrapping the training contract and pupillage, are among the “more radical” options being considered by the Legal Education and Training Review, according to its first discussion paper, issued yesterday.

Our latest round-up of news includes Fisher Meredith winning an appeal against a big wasted costs order, SRA figures on the number of firms and solicitors, the first law firm to ‘pin’ on growing social media service Pinterest, fee income up at the largest law firms, and more.

A City law firm is to license out to other practices a matter risk management system that has helped eliminate claims against the firm in recent times and saved around £600,000 a year in professional indemnity insurance premiums.

QualitySolicitors will this month launch the largest advertising campaign in the history of the legal profession ahead of a blitz that will see 8,000 adverts hit TV screens throughout May. The first of the new-look ads will be shown on Sunday 25 March, during the final of Dancing on Ice.

Now is the time for collective action by women lawyers who want to improve their lot in the legal world, the Law Society vice-president said yesterday. Lucy Scott Moncrieff said women lawyers also need to get noticed individually, but in a good way.

An innovative legal outsourcing business that uses former City solicitors to provide law firms and in-house departments with temporary support is set for a massive expansion, aiming to grow from 60 to 500 by the end of the year.

Flexible working combined with performance metrics that are not linked to hours in the office are needed to prevent a “female brain drain” from the legal profession, it was claimed today. A survey of 1,144 women lawyers around the world even found some support for quotas as a way to achieve gender diversity.

Lawyers must provide clearer pricing information to their clients or risk losing out to new entrants to the market, the Legal Ombudsman (LeO) has warned. LeO today issued a report on the problems issues around cost causes consumers, accounting for up to a quarter of all of its investigations.

The introduction of an aptitude test for prospective Bar students may be premature – and in any case fails to address the “real issue” of the mismatch between student numbers and training contracts/pupilages – the Law Society has told the Bar Standards Board.

The government has welcomed the first common framework to measure the progress of social mobility within the professions, which was launched last Friday. The social mobility toolkit was published by Professions for Good.