A cynic looking at the government’s consultation on “preserving and enhancing the quality of criminal advocacy” might well feel that Lord Chancellor Michael Gove was deliberately trying to foment trouble between the Bar and solicitors to divide and rule. It would be easy to characterise the proposals as giving the Bar what it wants by ‘doing something’ about those money-grabbing solicitors encroaching on the Bar’s patch. It’s hard to see anything that solicitors will like about them.

Legal Futures has gained exclusive access to what is believed to be the transcript of a secret meeting held recently between Lord Chancellor Michael Gove and a delegation from the Bar Council.

Who would have thought that something as inoffensive as ADR could cause such a rumpus? But the impact on the profession of the EU Directive on Consumer ADR has done just that. It means that, from today, every lawyer is obliged to point clients in the direction of an ADR provider should both of them wish to resolve a complaint that way, although the client still has the option of referring their complaint to the Legal Ombudsman

It has been 21 years since solicitors first acquired rights of audience in the higher courts but it has only been in the last decade or so that they began to seriously consider the advantages of keeping advocacy in-house. Many firms have created their own advocacy units consisting of solicitor-advocates and barristers, the latter realising that they had a better source of work as an in-house advocate within a firm of solicitors rather than awaiting ever-reducing numbers of instructions coming into chambers.

‘Putting the customer at the heart of everything we do’ is a phrase which has been widely adopted in Allianz, but how many organisations actually live and breathe this in their values? Doing the right thing for the customer should be embedded in the DNA of any organisation, especially those in the service industry, which like it or not includes law firms and insurers.