PLUS: Me Too backlash at law firms
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The Times
Monday November 12 2018
The Brief
Frances Gibb Jonathan Ames
By Frances Gibb and Jonathan Ames
It's Monday again ...

Those practising in state-funded areas of law claim there is a dangerous shortage of experts who are willing to provide evidence in child abuse cases, which they say is the latest damage to be caused by cuts to the legal aid system.

Meanwhile, the furore rumbled on over the weekend over the Asian barrister who was sacked by her Asian client because she was not a white man. The only Afghan-born barrister told The Times that she had been ditched from cases at least half a dozen times for the same reason in the last two years.

In the City, lawyers and accountants claim that EU data protection laws are stifling merger deals and a law firm partner has been suspended after a rival filmed him watching adult videos. And a coroner ruled on Friday that a GP was guilty of neglect for telling blood clot victim to “have fun”.

Breaking elsewhere this morning …
Police chiefs are pushing to expand their powers by lowering the level of suspicion officers need before stopping and searching suspects in the street, reports The Guardian. And a coroner in Northern Ireland confirmed that an inquest will begin this morning into the deaths of ten people during three days of shooting in Belfast in 1971, reports the Belfast Telegraph.

All that and more in this morning’s must-read of all things legal, including news, comment and gossip.
Today
LEGAL AID CUTS TRIGGER EXPERT SHORTAGE
Fake court papers trick Google into censorship
Supermarkets defeat taxman bid to tax cash machines
Men afraid to mentor young female lawyers, solicitor chief claims
Blue Bag diary: Silence in the courts
Comment: Fraud office’s iron fist looks soft
Tweet us @timeslaw with your views.
 
Story of the Day
Experts reluctant to speak in child abuse cases
Courts are struggling to find experts to give evidence in family cases, particularly those involving child abuse, according to the most senior family judge in England and Wales. Sir Andrew McFarlane, president of the High Court family division, said that courts needed access to high-quality expertise to determine a child’s future. He said that the “acute problem” in finding experts may have been exacerbated by cuts to legal aid fees.
Read the full story >
Fraud office’s iron fist looks soft
There is a startlingly low conviction rate for the offence of refusing to answer questions, Ian Ryan and Kyle Phillips write

Many lawyers will have had their interest piqued on hearing last week that the Serious Fraud Office had abandoned its pursuit of Benedikt Sobotka, the chief executive of Eurasian Resources Group, in connection with a long-running investigation into its predecessor company, the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation.
They will be further intrigued to hear that the fraud investigators have an alarmingly low success rate for prosecuting individuals for so-called section 2 offences.
Read the full story >
Special focus: law firm marketing
How to turn a simple press request into a horror story
The Times faced a wall of unhelpful and at times incompetent public relations staff when compiling the profiles of the firms that lawyers voted the best in their practice areas, reports Catherine Baksi

What are law firms getting from their PRs for and do they need better specialist training?

PLUS: When marketing is a PR disaster
Communications staff at six prominent English law firms mistakenly divulged confidential client information to The Times as part of the newspaper’s recent best law firms survey. Five of the practices are large, well-known City of London outfits, and the sixth is a respected smaller specialist firm.
Read the full story >
News round-up
Fake court papers trick Google into censorship
Forged court orders have been used in an attempt to deceive Google into removing hundreds of links (writes Billy Kenber). The name of a British businessman. Mason Soiza (pictured) appears to be among dozens of instances where the documents have been served on the search engine to try to force it to remove damaging information from search results.
Last week two fake documents were sent to Google in an attempt to censor a Times article revealing concerns about an alleged internet spammer. The documents, including an order which purported to be from the UK Supreme Court, were sent to the tech giant in an attempt to get the article removed from its search result.

PLUS: Law firm demanded celebrity sex scandal stories be taken down
Carter-Ruck, a London media law-specialist firm, has been accused of censorship after trying to force Google to remove links to seemingly lawful news articles by claiming that they breached an injunction.
Read the full story >
Retailers in line for £500m cashback after winning ATM battle
Leading high street retailers are due tax refunds of up to £500 million after appeal judges ruled yesterday that business rates should not be imposed on cash machines in shops.
Sainsbury’s, Tesco and the Co-op ­defeated the government over its ­attempt to place separate rates on thousands of cash machines in stores.
Commercial property specialists estimate that refunds to the supermarkets will be about £496 million. In addition, it is estimated that the Court of Appeal ruling will deprive HM Revenue & Customs of up to £40 million in tax each year.
Read the full story >
Men afraid to mentor young female lawyers, solicitor chief claims
Senior male partners at law firms are refusing to mentor younger women because of fears that unjustified allegations will be made against them, the head of the profession claims. There has been an unanticipated and unwanted backlash caused by the #MeToo movement, Christina Blacklaws (pictured), president of the Law Society, argued last week.
Read the full story >
EU data protection laws ‘stifling’ merger deals
Beefed up EU data protection laws are crippling merger deals, a report warns today as specialists blame the rules for an increase in failed transactions.
Complying with the EU’s recently implemented General Data Protection Regulation is a significant fetter on mergers and acquisitions, claim more than half of the specialists surveyed for a report published today.
Read the full story >
Ditched Asian lawyer had been stripped of six cases
An Asian woman barrister who was removed from a case because the defendant wanted a white man to represent him said that she had lost six similar instructions in two years. Rehana Popal, 29 (pictured), an immigration and civil law specialist in London, took to social media to highlight the most recent racist and misogynist snub.
On Thursday Ms Popal tweeted that she had “just had a solicitor call to tell me . . . the client has said he doesn’t want an Asian female but a white male barrister”. The solicitor who removed her on their client’s behalf could face disciplinary proceedings.
Read the full story >
City solicitor suspended after rival filmed him watching porn
A solicitor at a transatlantic law firm has been suspended after he was caught watching pornography — by a lawyer in another building (writes Tabby Kinder).
The Hogan Lovells partner was spotted looking at the adult video on his work computer by a lawyer who worked in the opposite office building at national practice Irwin Mitchell. The lawyer filmed the incident on a mobile phone.
Concerns were raised about whether confidential client documents could also have been on display.
Read the full story >
GP guilty of neglect for telling blood clot victim to ‘have fun’
A GP was guilty of neglect when she told a new mother who was dying from a blood clot to “go home and have some fun because she was having an anxiety attack,” a coroner has ruled. Nuala Morton went on to tell Michelle Roach, 32, to "come back when she had relaxed a bit”. Two days later Ms Roach was dead.
Read the full story >
In Brief
  • Budget airline Flybe pilot sacked for fear of flying – The Times
  • Driver who beeped horn tells of hate-crime ordeal – The Sunday Times
  • Fake solicitor jailed after taking thousands from victims – Legal Futures
  • Stobart enters court battle with founder Tinkler – The Sunday Times
  • Small firms’ call for disputes tribunal set to fall on deaf ears – The Times
  • By persecuting my father the child abuse inquiry has lost its moral compass, says Daniel Janner, QC – The Sunday Times
Comment
Manslaughter guidelines recognise that caregivers are at breaking point
New sentencing rules take into account the immense pressure that doctors are working under, write Edward Grange and Nick Barnard

Manslaughter is a rare offence: only 153 sentences across all forms, which range from "one punch" deaths to caregiver neglect, were passed in 2016. So why did the Sentencing Council decide last week to bring a definitive guideline into force, particularly given the announcement notes that sentencing in the majority of cases will not change as a result?
Read the full story >
Twitter
Tweet of the day
That feeling of euphoria when you have to remember to pack your passport in the morning! Not because you are going abroad but HMP require photo ID!
@skintsolicitor2
Student essay competition
Brexit: a threat or an opportunity for UK lawyers and legal London?
The Times and One Essex Court are offering you the chance to enter our student essay competition. There is more than £10,500 in prizes to be won. Entries must be submitted by November 30.

Entries will be judged by: the Rt Hon David Gauke MP, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice; Lord Grabiner, QC; John Witherow, editor of The Times; Lord Neuberger, former President of the UK Supreme Court and Anna Boase, barrister at One Essex Court.
Read the full story >
Blue Bag
Silence in the courts
With Armistice Day in the 100th year since the end of the First World War falling on a Sunday, the courts were not able to mark the traditional two-minute silence (writes Catherine Baksi).

But at five minutes to eleven on Friday morning a corner at the front of the Royal Courts of Justice in London came to a halt to host a small and dignified act of remembrance.

Led by the Tipstaff and the Queen’s Bench masters, who processed in their black gowns from the Bear Garden, Master Rose laid a wreath of poppies at the war memorial on the wall at the front of the hall to commemorate the staff of the court, as well as the tens of thousands of others, who lost their lives during the two world wars.

Security staff halted entrance to the court for the short tribute and the two-minute silence for the fallen, a poignant gesture demonstrating that those who, as John Maxwell Edmunds wrote, gave their today for our tomorrow are not forgotten.
Poacher … carries on poaching
More than two decades ago, Maurice Allen was described by a national Sunday newspaper as a “legal eagle turned master poacher” (writes Linda Tsang).

Allen, who had been Clifford Chance's youngest partner at 29, had just launched the London office of the US firm Weil Gotshal & Manges.

The move shocked law-land in the Square Mile. Then shock turned to consternation when Allen told the newspaper: “In a sense, they [major City law firms] make money in spite of themselves … They’ve become safe, bureaucratic organisations that are very poorly managed. It's very difficult to get decisions made. The partners have a job for life, and some of them are not terribly good. To be honest, being a partner in a big City law firm is boring.”

But who knew that the “poacher” label would turn out to be so prescient 20 years later … Allen’s CV reads like a legal directory. After Weil Gotshal, he went to the fellow American firm White & Case, then back to the magic circle and the partnership at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, before going back to the Americans as senior partner at Ropes & Gray. And latterly he was a consultant at the transatlantic behemoth DLA Piper.

Now Allen has now become that master poacher literally. Last month, he co-founded an outfit called Lawyer Talent Network with Leanne Clark. She is a former Freshfields lawyer, Matheson partner and Fox Rodney recruiter.
Closing Statement
Judges and regrettable remarks
I’m not quite sure how to interpret the judge’s comment about “perhaps unfair [media] attention” in the case where a court clerk pulled down a young lawyer’s blouse (James Morton writes).

Unfair to whom? It may well come to haunt the judge, just as some of those inappropriate comments from Melford Stevenson should have haunted that judge a generation ago.

Of course, Stevenson was not the only offender. In 1983, Brian Gibbens, an Old Bailey judge, when sentencing a man for committing a sexual offence against a seven-year-old girl, was reported in The Times to have said: “It strikes me without belittling the offence, it is one of the kind of accidents which happen in life to almost anyone.”

Three years later, it was the turn of Lord Lane, the lord chief justice, who as the most most senior judge in England and Wales should have known far better. Sentencing a man for distributing indecent images of 8-14-year-olds, he said: “It is not inappropriate, perhaps, in view of the puerility of this type of behaviour, to compare it rather to a schoolboy collecting cigarette cards in olden times.”

James Morton is a former criminal law solicitor and now author
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