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| Thursday February 14 2019 |
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By Jonathan Ames
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Good morning and welcome to the legal VD clinic – that’s Valentine’s Day, of course.
Sexism at the Bar is back in the spotlight on the year’s most romantic day as a junior female barrister lambasts her male colleagues on social media for behaving as though they are on a permanent stag-do.
Elsewhere, a charity says sharia councils would be redundant if divorce was made easier for Muslim women; Nissan’s ex-boss hires an acquittal specialist in Japan; tech giants won’t pay more tax unless the law is changed, says Bill Gates; and the Turkish authorities are warned over their alleged persecution of human rights lawyers.
See our Student Law supplement this morning for details of a growing row over fees for the reformed solicitor entry exam.
And if you just want to revel in VD, check out our Blue Bag diary for an assessment of how romantic the legal profession is. All that and more in this morning’s must-read of all things legal, including news, comment and gossip.
Linda Tsang, a freelance legal affairs journalist, contributed to today's bulletin.
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Today
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STOP ACTING LIKE YOU'RE ON A STAG DO, MALE BARRISTERS TOLD
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Juror who caused collapse of trial avoids jail
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Defunct firm wins battle over ‘negligent’ advice
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Comment: Stand up to bullying and make it a crime
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In this morning’s Times Law: Courts ‘are silencing abused women’
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And in Student Law: Game on – a new way of recruiting
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| Tweet us @timeslaw with your views. |
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Story of the Day
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Cut out ‘stag do’ behaviour, woman barrister warns male colleagues
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Some barristers behave as though they are on a “stag do” when working with women, according to a lawyer who has accused her male colleagues of repeatedly joking about breasts and skirts.
“If you’re a male in a male-heavy case,” wrote Joanna Hardy (pictured) in a series of tweets against sexism in the law, “don’t ask the female counsel to fetch the coffee/pour your water.”
Ms Hardy, a criminal law specialist at Red Lion chambers in London, said: “Try to remember their [women lawyers’] names. Don’t make repetitive jokes about breasts or skirts. Don’t communicate solely in innuendo.”
See Tweet of the Day below
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Read the full story
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Comment
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Stand up to bullying and make it a crime
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We need not fear it would be hard to police and to prove - harassment law can be a template, James Keeley writes
The fact that “bullying judges are driving women to quit the Bar” is appalling. It has to stop.
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Read the full story
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News round-up
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Juror who caused collapse of trial avoids jail
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An “intimidating” juror who started his own investigation into an alleged sex attack, forcing the trial to be abandoned, narrowly avoided jail yesterday. In a rare prosecution under the Juries Act 1974, Gary Henderson, 57, was accused of taking the law into his own hands while serving as a juror at Teesside crown court last November.
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Read the full story
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Defunct firm wins battle over ‘negligent’ advice
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A defunct law firm has overturned a ruling that its negligence caused a former miner to miss out on injury compensation. The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that Raleys Solicitors – a Yorkshire law firm that has since closed – was not responsible for “loss of chance” damages. Five justices of the UK’s top court unanimously backed the law firm in the first decision in 15 years on a loss of chance claim.
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Read the full story
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Row over fees for reformed solicitor entry exam
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Organisers of a controversial news qualification exam for solicitors have been accused of misleading students and law firms over claims that the system will cut costs.
Commentators point out that the “solicitors qualifying examination” — which is set to come into effect from autumn 2021 and is at the heart of the reformed regime — will not spawn a cheaper route to entry into the profession. They claimed that the US private education company contracted by regulators to provide the exam is set to earn nearly £30 million annually from the deal.
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Read the full story
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Stop Muslim women being trapped in marriages, charity pleads
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A leading Islamic charity is calling on the government to make it easier for Muslim women to divorce their husbands (Kaya Burgess writes).
The Muslim Women’s Network (MWN) claimed that sharia councils, which have been found to discriminate against women, could become redundant with a minor amendment to an existing law that allows Jewish women trapped in marriages to demand an instant divorce. Campaigners say that an extension to include Muslim women would mean they had no need to apply to sharia councils.
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Read the full story
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Tech giants won’t be pay more tax unless forced, says Gates
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Internet giants will not pay more tax than is legally required and politicians must legislate if they want to squeeze more cash from them, Bill Gates (pictured) said yesterday. The founder of Microsoft said that web and tech companies should “have the book thrown at them” if they break tax laws but suggested that they would inevitably use legal loopholes.
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Read the full story
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Ghosn hopes ‘Razor’ adds edge to defence
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Carlos Ghosn appointed a lawyer nicknamed the Razor to contest charges of financial misconduct in Japan yesterday as Renault stripped him of a golden parachute in France worth €29.6 million.
Junichiro Hironaka, 73 (pictured), a high- profile defence lawyer with a string of courtroom victories to his name, will represent the car industry executive, who has spent the past three months in detention in Tokyo. He will take over from Motonari Otsuru, 63, a former prosecutor to whom Mr Ghosn, 64, had originally entrusted his defence.
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Read the full story
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No justice while you persecute lawyers, Turkey told
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Turkey’s repeated arrests of a human rights activist are endangering the rule of law, international lawyers have said. Ramazan Demir, an awarding winning lawyer, has been the subject of longstanding criminal proceedings and, more recently, disciplinary action taken by the Istanbul Bar Association. Since the failed coup in 2016, he and 11 fellow lawyers have been charged with offences of making “propaganda for a terrorist organisation”.
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Read the full story
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In today's Times Law and Student Law
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News analysis
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Ministers face backlash over ‘disappointing’ review of legal aid reforms
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A senior barrister-MP is urging the government to go further to relieve the pressures on the justice system, writes Jonathan Ames
Ministers must not “kick down the road” issues around access to legal aid, a senior MP has warned after the government unveiled a long-awaited report last week. Bob Neill (pictured), a barrister and the chairman of the Commons justice committee, told the Ministry of Justice that its plan of further reviews and pilot schemes “must be swift and focused as the pressures across the whole justice system … are real and immediate”.
The Conservative MP was responding to the ministry’s review of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, which was published last Thursday. Ministers also published an “action plan”, which they billed as aiming “to deliver better support to people experiencing legal problems”.
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Read the full story
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Comment
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Lawyers can always put their friendships to one side
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Despite the London arbitration market being a cosy club, a recent High Court dispute shows that this needn’t give rise to conflicts of interest, write Ioannis Alexopoulos and Ryan Cable
Lawyers may develop warm and friendly relationships while working in London’s tight-knit arbitration market, but that doesn’t mean they can’t roll their sleeves up and act impartially as different parties in the same case. That, at least, was the finding in a recent High Court shareholders dispute, which confirmed the International Bar Association’s “traffic light” guidelines on conflict of interest and rejected a late challenge of a “warm and friendly relationship” between arbitrator and advocate.
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Read the full story
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Tweet of the day
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| @Joanna__Hardy I agree. Sadly, sometimes - I fear - we are our own worst enemy. Before all else, women at the Bar should look out for each other, standup for each other. United, we are a force to be reckoned with. Only then will real change and equality be achieved. |
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@HaywardSch
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Blue Bag
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Laws of attraction
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More than half of those in the legal profession are planning on celebrating Valentine’s Day this evening with their “loved one” – whoever that might be.
But sadly that is below the national average of 75 per cent, according to some boffins commissioned by the website OnBuy.com to survey more than 2,200 punters on their intentions for this evening. At least the legal profession is more romantic than those in IT, where, according to the researchers, just 36 per cent planned to spend the day with their sweetheart.
Freeze your eggs for Easter
While red roses and chocolates will be flying off the shelves for Valentine’s Day, the law firm Merali Beedle has published a survey which pre-empts Easter – after a fashion.
The firm found that egg freezing is up 400 per cent and asked whether women were being forced to choose between family and lucrative careers.
In 2017 the UK’s conception rate decreased by 2.5 per cent from the year before, with the percentage of babies born to parents older than 30 rising to 53 per cent for women and 68 per cent for men. This has pushed the average age of parenthood four years higher than it was in the 1970s.
To combat this, egg freezing procedures in the UK have quadrupled from 2010 to 2016.
Adam Merali, co-founder of the law firm, where 66 per cent of the lawyers are parents with young children, said the research showed that “it is increasingly difficult to be a parent and work in a high-powered industry. These industries must continue to listen to the needs of their talented team-members with families, or they may ultimately lose them”.
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Closing Statement
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Good counsel
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In the bad old days of the 1960s (writes James Morton), there were stories that briefs to counsel from certain solicitors simply read “good luck” or “counsel will do the best he can”.
It was nothing new even then. Henry Hawkins, the 19th-century judge, claimed that in the 1840s in his early days at the Bar he had one which read: “If the case is called before 3.15pm the defence of the accused is left to the ingenuity of counsel. If it is called after that hour the defence has an alibi as, by that time, the usual alibi witnesses will have returned from Norwich where they are at present professionally engaged.”
James Morton is a former criminal law solicitor and now author
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