News

The Legal Services Board is explicitly threatening the Solicitors Regulation Authority, Bar Standards Board and ILEX Professional Standards with using its formal enforcement powers for the first time over their quality assurance for advocates scheme, Legal Futures can reveal. The regulators have branded the move as neither “helpful nor necessary”.

One of the country’s leading volume conveyancing firms has gone into administration following the abolition of home information packs, Legal Futures can reveal. While Fridays Property Lawyers Ltd – a licensed conveyancing firm which recently began offering probate services too – has been sold in a pre-packaged sale, there have been an unknown number of redundancies.

Three-quarters of lawyers who sought help with health problems last year complained of stress, support charity LawCare has reported, while warning that drug abuse in the profession is worse than its statistics indicate. LawCare opened 517 new case files in 2010, down from a record 549 in 2009, splitting 60/40 between women and men.

A spiralling number of partnership disputes is encouraging the development of specialist alternative dispute resolution, experts have said. It has led to the Association of Partnership Practitioners launching a Directory of Partnership Dispute Arbitrators and Mediators.

Experts at the Institute of Legal Finance & Management explain the impact of today’s VAT rise on billing by solicitors, barristers and other lawyers

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is opposing the regulation of will-writers, saying it may well be disproportionate and unnecessary. It has also emerged that the OFT is working with the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Institute of Professional Will-writers to improve advice to consumers on executor services.

The Legal Ombudsman service has issued its first formal decision, it has emerged. The first case to go all the way through to a final decision by an ombudsman concerned a complaint over delay and whether the costs were explained clearly.

Alternative business structures face a fine up of to £150 million for misconduct or non-compliance, with a figure of £50 million for individuals working within them, under plans released by the Legal Services Board (LSB). The LSB said such large figures “will have strong deterrence in the market and avoid situations where any entity or individual may consider ‘pricing in’ non-compliance”.

The crackdown on personal injury advertising started today as the Ministry of Justice unveiled plans to ban inducements to bring a claim. The current rules for claims management companies only ban the offer of “immediate” cash payments or similar benefits, but a consultation issued today proposes extending that to all inducements for making a claim.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Bar Standards Board are set to launch a “legal services stakeholder network”, to give the public a direct say in how legal services are regulated, Legal Futures can reveal.