Practice Management

Face-to-face advice remains important to clients in several key areas of legal work and can help ward off complaints, Legal Services Board research has found. The research by YouGov discovered face-to-face advice most prevalent in family matters and will-writing.

Bar students are set to become the first group offered exemptions from parts of the legal practice course (LPC), it has emerged. However, LPC providers will not be required to offer a discount on fees. The move has been driven by changes to the Qualified Lawyers Transfer Scheme.

An action plan to deal with a range of equality and diversity problems in the solicitors’ profession – from pay inequality and firms’ billing practices, to flexible working and career progression – is being drawn up within the Law Society, Legal Futures can reveal.

Offering would-be solicitors – and particularly paralegals – a route to qualification that does not require a training contract may not be the way to reduce barriers to access to the profession, new research has suggested.

The Court of Appeal has once again declined to follow the landmark House of Lords ruling in Sephton when deciding when the limitation period starts running for the purposes of a professional negligence claim. It is a decision hailed as good news for lawyers.

Legal Services Board chairman David Edmonds is wrong to say there is a “disconnect” between legal education and legal practice, it was claimed last week by the man who has systematically reviewed the Bar’s education and training regime.

A leading supplier of outsourced employment law services to thousands of businesses has itself been found to have unfairly dismissed three legal staff after failing to follow proper redundancy procedures.

The chief executive of national law firm Russell Jones & Walker has questioned the ability of large solicitors’ consortiums to provide clients with a consistent service across the board. Neil Kinsella stressed the importance of independence and consistency.

The Bar Standards Board has approved the latest version of guidance on “signposting” requirements to notify lay clients of their rights to complain about poor service. It hopes the new formula will satisfy both disgruntled barristers and the Legal Services Board.

Lawyers are warming to the use of social media in their practices but have reservations about risks associated with cloud computing, according to a major survey of law firm IT personnel. Three-quarters of the 712 specialists surveyed said they felt positive about social media as a tool to deliver value to their firms.

The founder of property website Rightmove enters the law today with the intention of making his online conveyancing service the market leader within three years, Legal Futures can reveal. It is being marketed on the basis of service quality, rather than price.

Every partner in a law firm is now expected to be a “rainmaker”, yet those who show the most talent for winning clients can be a disruptive influence, a panel of senior commercial lawyers has concluded.

The TikitTFB User Association has had a record-breaking start to the 2011 series of local user group meetings, with 51 delegates attending the London meeting last week and 60 people attending the northern meeting in Leeds on Tuesday.

Linder Myers has signed contracts to implement a 200-user LawSoft 10 system. Headquartered in Manchester city centre, with offices in Shropshire and Lancashire, Linder Myers is a successful, growing, full-service business.

Lesbian, gay and bisexual lawyers and staff could be inadvertently “outed” as a result of the Legal Services Board’s plans to increase diversity in the workplace, leading campaign group Stonewall has warned. The charity strongly supported monitoring the sexual orientation of staff but said the board needs to find another way of doing it.