Practice Management

A niche alternative business structure working with companies that build the global infrastructure of technology has used it to take on external funding and non-lawyers who can help the business grow.

A legal secretary who claimed she felt humiliated and insulted by a colleague commenting on her 50th birthday has lost her claim for harassment and age discrimination against the law firm.

The government’s court modernisation programme may not be completed by the deadline of 2023, the House of Commons public accounts committee has warned.

Transferring the ownership of law firms to employee ownership trusts (EOTs) boosts staff loyalty by giving them more security if the firm is sold, the chief executive of the latest firm to create an EOT has said.

The Ministry  of Justice has injected £2m into boosting the development of lawtech via a government-funded network that backs tech start-ups.

Apprenticeships offer significant benefits to both young people and their employers, allowing law firms to plan their staffing several years in advance, a conference heard last week.

Enhancing access to justice appears to be ancillary to the court modernisation programme rather than its central goal, MPs warned yesterday.

The EU is pumping in £4m to fund an innovation lab at a south Wales law school which will carry out research into artificial intelligence and other legal tech innovations.

Oxford University has been awarded a government grant of £213,000 to research the people rather than the technology behind the legaltech boom.

The profession needs to keep working to address unconscious bias, as “we have not yet reached the stage where a successful woman is accepted as the norm”, Dame Heather Hallett said last week.

An employment tribunal has rejected all the claims of discrimination, victimisation and whistleblowing made by a barrister who also acted as the chambers manager.

The buzz around distributed ledger technology, including blockchain, is much more than hype and the tech will eventually transform conveyancing and probate, a leading academic has indicated.

City clients will make allowances for a lawyer who has made personal health and taking steps to avoid burnout a top priority, a former corporate partner-turned-fitness entrepreneur has said.

A former senior in-house lawyer at Shell cannot rely on a leaked internal email or an overheard pub conversation in his discrimination claim against the company, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

Big law firms are more likely to introduce salaried partnership status if they have large numbers of women lawyers – but research finds no evidence that this is used to discriminate against them.