|
| Wednesday October 4 2017 |
|
|
|
By Frances Gibb and Jonathan Ames
|
|
The Brief has been slightly on the brief side over the last couple of days because it was asked to chair a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference, which was sponsored by Demos, the cross-party think-tank, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority. But we are back now, so on to this morning’s must-read of all things legal, including news, comment and gossip. For more in-depth coverage ...
|
|
Subscribe to The Brief Premium
|
|
|
|
Today
|
| ◆ |
SOLICITOR-GENERAL BACKS RETHINK OVER LEGAL AID CUTS
|
| ◆ |
Vulnerable people wait nine months for care decisions
|
| ◆ |
Bar watchdog considers pay boost for pupils
|
| ◆ |
Western Europe leads third quarter M&A deal figures
|
| ◆ |
EU cartel investigations treble in a year
|
| ◆ |
Lidington announces jobs boost for ex-offenders
|
| ◆ |
Blue Bag diary: Silk stockings and football boots at Tory party conference
|
| ◆ |
The Churn: Former Tory MP takes reins at equity release body
|
| ◆ |
premium
Analysis: Law firms must reduce stress for younger lawyers
|
| ◆ |
premium
Comment: Don’t worry: AI isn’t coming for your job just yet, says Lord Clement-Jones
|
| ◆ |
premium
Comment: Legal system is at breaking point, says Lord Falconer
|
| ◆ |
premium
Analysis: London must work to keep its property crown after Brexit
|
| Tweet us @timeslaw with your views. |
|
Comment
|
|
Premium
|
|
|
Don’t worry: AI isn’t coming for your job just yet
|
|
Lord Clement-Jones kicks off our artificial intelligence week convinced that robots will not take over from lawyers any time soon
|
|
|
|
Story of the Day
|
|
Solicitor-general backs rethink over legal aid cuts
|
|
Ministers should increase state funding for early legal advice in some civil law cases, one of the government’s senior law officers told the Conservative Party conference.
Robert Buckland, QC, the solicitor-general, said that his personal view was “that the criteria applied by the Legal Aid Agency has been too restrictive and I think that is wrong. There is unfairness that needs to be addressed.”
Speaking to a fringe meeting at the conference, Buckland said he hoped that the forthcoming results of a review of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) would result in increased funding.
Legal aid lawyers have criticised the legislation for curtailing eligibility for civil legal aid. And the solicitor-general gave a strong indication that he sympathised with the argument that reducing access to initial advice was a false economy because early intervention could prevent more costly problems in the future.
Buckland dismissed the main recommendation of the recent Bach report, which called for the creation of a statutory right to access to justice for the public that would mirror access to health services. “That sounds good and makes for a good headline, but it won’t work,” he said.
However, Buckland acknowledged that little separated his views from those in the report concerning early advice. “There is a strong case for a significant increase in funding for early advice legal aid. That should be looked at again and there is definitely some common ground between us and Bach in that area,” he said.
Buckland’s comments were partially echoed by the lord chancellor, David Lidington, who was speaking at another Society of Conservative Lawyers event in Manchester. Lidington also indicated that early advice funding would be given serious consideration in the Ministry of Justice review of the legislation.
Lidington’s remarks were cautiously welcomed by legal profession leaders. Andrew Langdon, QC, chairman of the Bar Council, the body that represents barristers in England and Wales, said that he was encouraged by the comments from the lord chancellor and solicitor-general. “Waiting for the review of LASPO has been a bit like waiting for Godot,” he said.
Liz who? Ex-lord chancellor got it wrong over judges, hint Tory MPs
Conservative party lawyer MPs rushed to distance themselves from Liz Truss, David Lidington’s predecessor as lord chancellor who was reshuffled to the role of chief secretary to the treasury in June.
Truss was pilloried by many in the legal profession during the Brexit Article 50 litigation earlier this year, when she was seen as slow to defend judges who had given rulings that were unpopular with sections of the media.
“A prompt and robust response is always the best way to deal with unfair and ill-informed criticism of the judiciary,” Robert Buckland, QC, the solicitor-general, told a conference fringe meeting.
“Politicians must go into bat for judges,” agreed Alex Chalk, the barrister MP for Cheltenham. “And judges must explain better to the public what they do.”
Buckland picked up on that latter theme, saying: “The problem for the judges is that they cannot easily answer or respond to criticism. They are also naturally reluctant to get involved in public debate. And there should be no need for them to do so.”
However, Buckland said would encourage judges to be more communicative with the public. In an ironic echoing of statements earlier this year from Truss, he said: “Here in Manchester there is a large court centre. And it is open for judges to demystify the role of the judiciary and to let the public in on the secret of what it means to be a judge.”
See Blue Bag and Quote of the Day below
|
|
News round-up
|
|
Vulnerable people wait nine months for care decisions
|
|
Crucial decisions about the care of people who are mentally incapacitated are taking up to nine months because of a significant rise in court workload, research shows.
The Court of Protection (CoP), which makes financial and welfare decisions for people who lack mental capacity, is now hearing more than 4,000 cases a year compared with the 200 that were anticipated when it was set up ten years ago.
Delays take between four and nine months for cases involving decisions on personal welfare, such as where people should live or how they should be cared for.
Julie Doughty, a lecturer in law at Cardiff University and a member of the research team, said that although the delays had improved slightly since 2013-14, it was still "a very lengthy time for a review of detention”.
Each case costs local authorities between £10,000 and £13,000, which could be a “chilling” deterrent to people bringing disputes before the court, says the report.
Figures from the Ministry of Justice showed that the median cost of a legal aid certificate in a case involving a decision over medical treatment was £7,672. For a non-medical case the cost was £20,874 and for a case involving deprivation of liberty it was £7,288.
Litigants funding their own court cases were likely to face “substantially higher” costs.
The researchers said: “The high public and private cost of welfare litigation in the CoP is a major barrier to accessing justice and is likely to have a significant chilling effect on bringing disputes and serious issues before the CoP.”
The research was based on two studies by researchers at Cardiff University and funded by the Nuffield Foundation into the work of the CoP since it was launched.
The researchers said that the jurisdiction had “changed beyond recognition” from that originally envisaged when the court was proposed during the 1990s. Whereas earlier cases mostly concerned serious medical treatment, now the most common cases involve where people should live, how they should be cared for, questions about relationships with individuals or whether the patient can consent to sex or marriage.
Medical treatment accounts for a small proportion of cases, with social care professionals and local authorities now the main users of the court.
|
|
Bar watchdog considers pay boost for pupils
|
Strict restrictions on the training regime for barristers could be loosened to allow chambers to tailor pupillages for individuals, the profession’s regulator has said.
The Bar Standards Board (BSB) is also looking at boosting the minimum grants that chambers are required to pay pupils, admitting that the current figure falls below the national living wage.
The board said it recognised that the rules did not allow barristers’ sets any flexibility in their approach to the structure of pupillages, which all prospective barristers must complete before being allowed to practise.
“Chambers or organisations offering pupillage may want to tailor their training plans in other ways to better suit their needs,” said the board in a consultation paper released yesterday.
“Our current rules do not permit this, as they require that all regulated pupillages must be for a period of 12 months. To allow the Bar greater flexibility in the way that pupillage is structured, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of removing the 12-month rule, seek your views on the length of pupillage, and ask whether a minimum or a maximum time should be prescribed by the BSB.”
Pupil pay is also in the regulators’ crosshairs. All pupils must be paid a minimum of £12,000 over the course a one-year pupillage, a rate that the board says is below the national living wage.
“There is evidence that some prospective barristers from lower socio-economic backgrounds cannot afford, or are put off from entering, pupillage,” the paper says.
“We also recognise the potential cost increase of a higher minimum payment for chambers and other organisations offering pupillage, particularly those who undertake publicly funded work.”
While pupillage grants at the large sets of commercial chambers are generous, there are few places. There is growing concern that those chambers recruit the students from a small group of elite universities, while students from less advantaged socio-economic backgrounds are left to apply to sets offering far lower grants.
|
|
|
Western Europe leads third quarter M&A deal figures
|
The value of mergers and acquisitions in western Europe rose by more than 20 per cent in the third quarter of the year, according to a report that will cheer City of London law firms.
Transaction values in the region were up by 21 per cent on the same quarter in 2016.
However, reports from across the Atlantic were less encouraging, with deal value in the US sinking year-on-year for the third quarter by 11 per cent. That decline came despite an increase of 16 per cent in the number of transactions conducted in the third quarter.
Deal values and volume in Asia-Pacific remained relatively flat over the third quarter but the figures showed a significant rise in intra-Asian transactions, which were worth nearly $121 billion (£91.3 billion) in the first nine months of this year. That was the highest level on record in the region for a nine-month period.
Lawyers attributed the boom in Asia to China’s capital control regime on outbound deal activity into Europe and North America. “The restrictions are having relatively less impact on deals within the region,” said Bernardine Lam, a partner in the Hong Kong office of Allen & Overy, the City of London “magic circle” law firm that compiled the figures.
Lam said that activity in Asia was particularly buoyant around deals that were “considered to be genuinely strategic and more in line with political objectives. Where possible, Chinese investors have been looking to deploy cash that has been held offshore in either of the region’s two main financial hubs, Hong Kong and Singapore, enabling them to operate outside the scope of the capital controls”.
|
|
EU cartel investigations treble in a year
|
Investigations into cartels and price-fixing deals almost trebled over the last year, as the European Commission authorities launched a crackdown on anti-competitive practices, according to new figures.
Brussels launched investigations into 473 companies over the past 12 months, up from 134 in 2015-16, according to the data business Thomson Reuters.
Ecommerce businesses were specifically targeted as part an inquiry by the commission that opened two years ago. Its findings, which were published in May, highlighted significant competition concerns around the phenomenon known as geo-blocking.
Geo-blocking involves companies preventing online consumers from purchasing its products or services on the basis of the consumer’s nationality or place of residence. It usually takes the form of a refusal to deliver goods to customers in member states other than that of the seller, followed by refusals to accept payments from such customers.
Other EU competition investigations over the past 12 months have targeted companies sectors including transport, car manufacturing and financial services, according to the researchers. Many of those involved multiple parties, which partially explains the high number of investigations opened over the past year.
The researchers predicted that the number of investigations would increase further after the commission’s strengthened whistleblowing facilities came into force in March.
|
|
Lidington announces jobs boost for ex-offenders
|
Ex-offenders will be helped into jobs under a scheme matching employers with prisoners, the justice secretary announced yesterday.
David Lidington said a national task force would ensure that training in prisons matched the demands in the local job market, as he outlined his ambition to convince employers of the benefits of hiring former offenders.
In a speech to the Conservative party conference in Manchester, Lidington also said that there would be additional intelligence-led anti-drone operations to disrupt the devices as they flew into prison airspace, alongside a new generation of body scanners to tackle drug smuggling at prisons.
Lidington said that the work of “overcoming the challenges” in prisons meant looking “beyond the prison walls for solutions”. He added: “The evidence shows that a former prisoner who has got work — who has got both responsibility and the opportunities that a job provides — is far less likely to reoffend in the future.”
|
|
In Brief
|
- Global firms drive China partner numbers up by 17% -- The Lawyer
- Legal brains will have a week to defeat AI in lawyer v machine challenge – Legal Futures
- PhD law student sues Queen’s University Belfast for ‘catalogue of failings’ – Legal Cheek
|
|
Analysis
|
|
Law firms must reduce stress for younger lawyers
|
|
Premium
|
|
Increased competition between law firms is piling pressure on young lawyers for whom routine 12-hour days are taking a toll, writes Howard Hymanson
Working for 12 hours a day for days on end with little respite over the weekend is commonplace for many lawyers, especially younger ones. It is too easy to lose sight of how deeply ingrained these unhealthy working patterns have become. And lawyers often fail to recognise that they are falling ill and that the demands of the job are to blame.
|
Read the full story
|
|
Comment
|
|
Premium
|
|
|
Britain’s legal system is at breaking point
|
|
Seven years of cuts mean that justice is often available only to the wealthy, says Lord Falconer
|
|
|
|
|
Tweet of the day
|
| Started pupillage on 1 October 1990, twenty-seven years ago, now about to watch former pupil master sworn in as Justice of UK Supreme Court |
|
@BarbaraRich_law
|
|
Blue Bag
|
|
Silk stockings and football boots at Tory party conference
|
David Lidington, the still relatively new lord chancellor, dashed to Manchester after the opening of the legal year in London on Monday to attend an event hosted by the Society of Conservative Lawyers at the Tory party conference.
The setting, a grade II listed hotel in the heart of town, was suitably grand. Indeed, so grand that Lidington felt obliged to apologise to the faithful Tory lawyers on hand, including Robert Buckland, QC, the solicitor-general, for “dressing down” for the event. “Earlier today I was wearing a lovely pair of silk stockings,” he said.
The event was sponsored by the Law Society and the Bar Council, whose leaders were on hand to schmooze. Just how difficult was it to enter the belly of the beast for Joe Egan, wondered The Brief? The Law Society president, who runs a law firm in Bolton, is after all a self-proclaimed Corbynista.
“No trouble at all,” Egan responded wryly. “Indeed, at my own law firm we even employ fully paid up Manchester United season ticket holders.” Egan is a died-in-the-wool Wanderers man.
|
|
A dog's life at The Shed
|
City of London law firms have a reputation of working their trainees and junior associates like dogs, but now one is driving home the point by actually turning over a floor of its offices to the canines.
Eversheds Sutherland, the latest in a growing gang of transatlantic practices, has told The Brief that it is working with the Canine Creche Group, some professional dog-sitters, to organise a “bring your dog to work day” for the firm’s staff and lawyers.
No date has been arranged, but they are getting very excited over at The Shed about the prospect of playing host to a pack of panting, slavering and barking pooches.
It’s all part of the firm’s “wellness programme” (of course) and is the brainchild of Lee Ranson, Eversheds Sutherland’s co-chief executive. A spokeswoman for the firm reveals that it it was inspired by Richard Lampert, one of the firm’s real estate partners, whose dog Polo has been something of a trailblazer by routinely visiting the offices.
But the thing about excitable dogs is that they tend to make a mess, especially in unfamiliar environments, which raises the prospect of Ranson and his senior management team being drafted in to deal with the “poo bags”. (Try finding a heading for that on the time recording software.)
And for those at the firm — heaven forbid — who do not see canines as man’s best friends? “By having the dogs in one contained space we can make sure those who don’t like dogs, are allergic, etc, aren’t bothered by them,” the spokeswoman says.
As for future cat/hamster/goldfish days at this ground-breaking international legal practice? “Let’s see how the dog day goes.”
|
|
Are you sure that’s a fish … ?
|
Just as the Devil has all the best tunes, criminal law specialist lawyers have all the best stories.
For those who missed it last week, our lawyer of the week in Scotland produced a cracker. Asked what was the funniest thing to have happened in her career, Shelagh McCall, QC, who has just taken over the human rights organisation JUSTICE north of the border, said: “When I was a solicitor, a criminal client beckoned me into an alleyway. I was apprehensive as he opened his trenchcoat …revealing a huge salmon he’d poached from the river. I explained I was vegetarian and beat a hasty retreat.”
|
|
The Churn
|
|
Former Tory MP takes reins at equity release body
|
A former Conservative MP has landed at the body that represents equity release businesses.
David Burrowes, who was a practising solicitor for more than 20 years before being elected as the MP for Enfield Southgate in London, is to take over as chairman of the Equity Release Council. He lost his seat in parliament when Labour made a surprise resurgence in the general election.
Burrowes’ vote fell by nearly 7 per cent in the election, with Bambos Charalambous taking the seat with a majority of more than 4,300.
Ironically, Charalambous is a former in-house lawyer for Hackney council in east London and now sits on the House of Commons justice committee.
On his new role, Burrowes said: “As a society we face significant challenges in addressing the impact of an ageing population, rising social care needs and inadequate pension funds.”
He added that he hoped to “use my experience gained in parliament to further this cause and to build the profile of equity release with a diverse range of stakeholders across industry, government and regulators”.
|
|
|
Quote of the day
|
|
“It is important that we don’t see pro bono as just something nice for law students to have on their CVs”
|
|
Jon Hainey, president of the Manchester Law Society and a partner at DWF, speaking at a fringe event at this week’s Conservative Party conference
|
|
If you no longer wish to receive these communications, please follow this link to edit your email preferences. You will continue to receive newsletters with exclusive benefits and updates, Times+ newsletters, offers and promotions and market research emails, provided you have not unsubscribed from those individual communications.
This email is from a member of the News UK group. News Corp UK & Ireland Limited, with its registered office at 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF, United Kingdom is the holding company for the News UK Group and is registered in England No. 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.
To see our privacy policy, click here.
|
|
|
