Practice Management

Adrian Bennett of Thorneycroft explains how his firm has benefited from installing Proclaim Case Management and Proclaim Accounts from Legal Futures Associate Eclipse.

After all the predictions of solicitors’ professional indemnity insurance (PII) premiums going through the roof, figures from the Solicitors Regulation Authority show a 15% fall across the profession for 2010/11, back to pre-recession levels. However, there has been a massive 57% jump in the number of firms in the assigned risks pool.

The second in a series of extracts from Climate Change, a report on the impact of the Legal Services Act published by accountants Baker Tilly, looks at the growing role of outsourcing both front and back-office work, and how far it could go.

The Legal Ombudsman service needs to work out the limits of its jurisdiction “and quickly”, as new business models emerge, chief ombudsman Adam Sampson has said. Mr Sampson said that with the pace of legal services reform accelerating and the legal services market “rapidly moving away from a reliance on the high street solicitor” and towards new providers entering the market “with very different business models”, it is very important to consumers that LeO is clear about what is and is not within its jurisdiction.

Solicitors need to be vigilant about large debts being run up in their name as a result of fraudulent store card applications, Legal Futures Associate the Lawyers Defence Group has warned. The legal defence and advice organisation raised the alarm after it was revealed by one popular DIY store that a number of solicitors have been targeted in this way.

Following on from my previous post about Foursquare, now I am concentrating on Squidoo and HubPages. Squidoo is an online publishing platform and community that lets you create “lenses” (pages) about a particular topic. It is free to join and you can even earn 50% of the company’s advertising revenue for charity or yourself.

There are 383 law firms currently in the assigned risks pool, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has revealed. The news comes as the Association of British Insurers (ABI) gave a strong welcome to an independent report on the need for reform of professional indemnity insurance, saying the market can no longer tolerate periodic crises caused by a combination of “poorly enforced regulation and restrictive policy requirements”.

The escalating cost of professional indemnity insurance may mean the total premium pot for solicitors approaches £300m this year, the first time it will have exceeded the last contribution to the Solicitors Indemnity Fund, a leading broker has predicted. The news comes as a report on PII commissioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority recommended a range of reforms to the scheme, including removing the minimum terms and conditions in relation to commercial clients, ending the single renewal date and no longer requiring insurers to cover firms that have not paid their premiums.

Legal Services Board chief executive Chris Kenny has spoken out in favour of the “holy grail” of diversity neutral aptitude testing across legal careers. Addressing a legal education conference at Harvard University in America – one of the first times the LSB has seriously addressed its role in legal education – Mr Kenny also hit out at lawyers who see their ethical training as creating “a wall of professional exclusivity”.

Solicitors have generally seen a “substantial increase” in their professional indemnity insurance (PII) premiums this year, the Law Society has reported. The society’s PII helpline also received complaints about short deadlines to accept quotes, variable quotes from the same insurer and brokers being “less than truthful” with solicitors.

Indian outsourcing company Mangalam Information Technologies has set up an office in Manchester as it explores the opportunities for legal process outsourcing (LPO) in the UK, including “low hanging fruits” such as personal injury (PI) and conveyancing work. It comes as UK-based LPO providers estimated that they could reduce transactional costs in PI by up to 30%.

Solicitors’ firms put off becoming limited companies by the complexity of conversion from partnerships are missing out on “very substantial” tax savings, according to one former firm that incorporated successfully three years ago.

The Legal Ombudsman (LeO) will seek to determine complaints that cross over into professional negligence, it has emerged. Chief ombudsman Adam Sampson said that while its predecessor bodies, such as the Legal Complaints Service, would shy away from complaints about the quality of legal advice offered, the Legal Services Act “makes no mention of any such limitation of our powers”.

There is widespread ignorance of the differences between legal services providers and consumers are shocked to discover not all of them are regulated, research commissioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority has found. Consumers expect “all legal service providers to be appropriately skilled, qualified and regulated” and so distinguish between providers on such things as customer service and the quality of relationships.

The Cabinet has given its backing to Lord Young’s blueprint to reform health and safety and curb the excesses of the compensation culture, the peer revealed today. He also expressed a desire to see an end to referral fees and said the Ministry of Justice had agreed to extend the road traffic accident claims process to other areas of personal injury.