The Law Business: 20th to 26th May

Welcome to the year's 20th edition of the weekly 'Law Business' column brought to you by the SundayLawReview team. 

A dedicated worker may be hard to come by these days but according to a latest survey, lawyers are dedicated workaholics. The figures put legal professionals some way ahead of accountants and IT professionals. However, according to a senior lawyer, this dedication does not always reflect in equal promotional prospects for women lawyers, with some firms holding an unconscious bias against women. Lady Justice Hallett, a senior woman judge has warned of the frenetic pace of life holding women back. Adding to this the inability of many women to promote themselves within an organisation, there is some way to go towards achieving gender equality.

The purpose of this column is to take a serious look at what happened in the business of law within UK as reported by online legal publications throughout last week.


TheLawMap interview with Barrister Camilla Choudhury Khawaja on the image of the women lawyer and if there is still a glass ceiling as well as her thoughts women's rights issues.


The most interesting articles on developments, compliance, business of law within UK or as well as international developments of interest to UK law firms and legal practioners: 
 

Interesting articles on the study of law, legal training, pupillage, associates, legal academia & law students: 



Articles of the week:

The UK and international articles of the week are pieces selected by @TheLawMap tweeting team based on recommendations from friends and followers of LawNewsIndex.com daily law news blog.

 

  • Fighting hate speech against women on Facebook | Jane Martinson - Women's Blog, The Guardian 
  • South African lawyers urged to fight 'racial prejudice' | James Barnes - The Global Legal Post 
  • How does EU environmental law affect the UK? | Staff reporter - Resource Magazine 
  • Intellectual property rights at the core of Apple’s Irish subsidiaries | Colm Keena - The Irish Times 
  • Scottish Courts need to catch up with police in tackling domestic abuse | Annie Brown - Daily Record 
  • London attack: now is the time to defend our liberties, not give in to fear | Isabella Sankey, Comment is Free - The Guardian 
  • Saudi Arabia accepts registration of female lawyer | Jonathan Rayner - Law Gazette 

Lawyers, Law Firms, Chambers & ABS in the news this week: 

Friday 24th May
Thursday 23rd May
Wednesday 22nd May
Tuesday 21th May
Monday 20th May

 

We would like to thank all the publications cited in this week's column. Please notify via @TheLawMap Twitter handle of any errors or omissions.

 

TheLawMap Publications at a glance: 
LawNewsIndex.com - Daily Law News Archive
SundayLawReview.com - Weekly Law Business News Blog
Law Specials - A compendium of articles and interviews on Justice & Society
Wig - Daily Newspaper Focusing on Law & Society
MetaLawIndex - Informal Blog chronicling life behind the scene at LawNewsIndex & Twitter

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The Law Business: 13th to 19th May

Welcome to the year's 19th edition of the weekly 'Law Business' column brought to you by the SundayLawReview team. 

Competent interpreters are becoming increasingly difficult to find as highlighted by a recent case where the Crown Court Judge had to adjourn the case after an interpreter had refused to turn up citing the excuse that he 'would not be paid enough'. Court services have claimed that in up to 50 percent of cases involving translation service, interpretation had to be bypassed as the individuals were either not competent or did not bother to turn up. 

The Home Secretary Theresa May has voiced her intent to further protect police officers by introducing compulsory whole life sentences for criminals who kill police officers in England and Wales. This raises the issue of should a life sentence mean life. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 permits the Justice Secretary, after consultation with the Sentencing Council, to make an order to change starting points for sentences, meaning, in this instance to change the starting point of 30 years life sentence to a whole life order. The Sentencing Council is the official body that oversees sentencing in England and Wales, issues guidelines for judges and magistrates to work to for all offences other than murder. However, a spokesman for the Sentencing Council commented that such a measure would involve changes in the law, which is a matter for parliament than the body itself.

Courts should be able to regulate individual requests for assisted suicide without reference to parliament, senior judges have been told. In the latest attempt to overturn the prohibition on doctors helping to end the lives of their patients, the court of appeal is considering three requests for legal guidelines to be relaxed. The cases concern a plea from widow of Tony Nicklinson and two others.

The purpose of this column is to take a serious look at what happened in the business of law within UK as reported by online legal publications throughout last week.


TheLawMap interview with Lawyer Nqobani Nyathi from The Legal Resources Foundation in Zimbabwe about the role of the lawyer in Africa in general as well as an insight into the legal process in Zimbabwe.


The most interesting articles on developments, compliance, business of law within UK or as well as international developments of interest to UK law firms and legal practioners: 
 

Interesting articles on the study of law, legal training, pupillage, legal academia & law students: 



Articles of the week:

The UK and international articles of the week are pieces selected by @TheLawMap tweeting team based on recommendations from friends and followers of LawNewsIndex.com daily law news blog.


  • Identity, family, marriage: our core conservative values have been betrayed. Tory leaders have forgotten what Edmund Burke understood: true conservatives are driven by more than economics | Roger Scruton - Comment is Free, The Guardian
  • The UK’s Legal Response to the London Bombings of 7/7 | Clare Feikert-Ahalt - In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress  
  • How Should the Law Think About Robots? | Neil M Richards & William Smart, Washington University in St Louis - Social Science Research Network
  • The profound problem of male sexual violence | Various - The Guardian Letters
  • Valuable as Art, but Priceless as a Tool to Launder Money | Patricia Cohen - The New York Times 
  • Guantanamo Bay: Inside a Legal Nightmare - Book Review: 'The Terror Courts'  | John Knefel - Rolling Stone Politics   
  • Can Faith Substitute for Human Rights? Creating a new culture of Human & Women's Rights in Egypt | Yasmine Mahmoud Fakhry - PeaceXpeace.org  

Lawyers, Law Firms, Chambers & ABS in the news this week: 

Friday 17th May
Thursday 16th May
Wednesday 15th May
Tuesday 14th May
Monday 13th May

 

We would like to thank all the publications cited in this week's column. Please notify via @TheLawMap Twitter handle of any errors or omissions.

 

TheLawMap Publications at a glance: 
LawNewsIndex.com - Daily Law News Archive
SundayLawReview.com - Weekly Law Business News Blog
Law Specials - A compendium of articles and interviews on Justice & Society
Wig - Daily Newspaper Focusing on Law & Society
MetaLawIndex - Informal Blog chronicling life behind the scene at LawNewsIndex & Twitter

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The Law Business: 6th to 12th May

Welcome to the year's 18th edition of the weekly 'Law Business' column brought to you by the SundayLawReview team. 

This week's scathing attack on legal aid cuts came from the musician turned solicitor David Rowntree  and from a very senior judge, Lord Neuberger. Rowntree is the drummer with the acclaimed 90s Britpop band Blur and his criticism of the government came after it had been revealed that a subsidiary of the haulage firm Eddie Stobart had emerged as a leading contender in bidding for a new generation of criminal legal aid contracts that would deprive defendants of the right to choose their own solicitor. Hypothetically speaking, if the Legal Aid Agency contract is won by the same business who had also won the contract to provide security for prison, this privatised justice system could mean one ends up being represented by the same company that also jails. Lord Neuberger, the President of the Supreme Court, had said that changes in the legal aid system meant that while any citizen should be able to take a case to court no matter how small it may be, some would be prevented or seriously disadvantaged from pursuing the litigation path.


The purpose of this column is to take a serious look at what happened in the business of law within UK as reported by online legal publications throughout last week.



The most interesting articles on developments, compliance, business of law within UK or as well as international developments of interest to UK law firms and legal practioners: 
 

Interesting articles on the study of law, legal training, pupillage and legal academia: 



Articles of the week:

The UK and international articles of the week are pieces selected by @TheLawMap tweeting team based on recommendations from friends and followers of LawNewsIndex.com daily law news blog.

 

  • Legal aid tendering: will it actually work? | Joshua Rozenberg - Guardian Law  
  • Misogyny behind Irish State controls on women’s reproductive rights | Jacky Jones - The Irish Times 
  • Orphan Works - the new law in the UK | Francis Davey - Open Rights Group 
  • UK's New Defamation Law May Accelerate The Death Of Anonymous User-Generated Content Internationally | Eric Goldman - Forbes 
  • Legal aid cuts risks damaging civilised society, warns senor judge Lord Neuberger, the President of the Supreme Court | Tom Whitehead - The Telegraph   
  • Privatised justice is no justice at all: Chris Grayling's radical changes to legal aid could mean being represented by the same company that jails you | Nina Power - The Guardian
     

Lawyers, Law Firms, Chambers & ABS in the news this week: 

Friday 10th May
Thursday 9th May
Wednesday 8th May
Tuesday 7th May
Monday 6th May

 

We would like to thank all the publications cited in this week's column. Please notify via @TheLawMap Twitter handle of any errors or omissions.

 

TheLawMap Publications at a glance: 
LawNewsIndex.com - Daily Law News Archive
SundayLawReview.com - Weekly Law Business News Blog
Law Specials - A compendium of articles and interviews on Justice & Society
Wig - Daily Newspaper Focusing on Law & Society
MetaLawIndex - Informal Blog chronicling life behind the scene at LawNewsIndex & Twitter

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The Law Business: 29th April to 5th May

Welcome to the year's 17th edition of the weekly 'Law Business' column brought to you by the SundayLawReview team. 

Legal Aid lawyers' favourite headline of the week and perhaps the most retweeted of all our tweets was Oliver Wright's piece from The Independent, 'It doesn’t take a lawyer to realise this attack on legal aid will have a deleterious effect on justice'. In his piece Wright lays into a stringent attack on the Conservative-led coalition government's plan to reform the justice system. The 800 hundred year old tradition of fair and open access to justice is at stake in these reforms. The proposed savings of £200 million from the Legal Aid budget is likely to exacerbate the challenging times that the legal profession is already experiencing. The game at play is rather a dangerous one for all public defendants as the unjustified blanket image of the 'blood-sucking lawyer' as portrayed by the right wing media makes it very difficult for the profession to earn public sympathy and count on the likes of anti-polltax mass protests of yesteryears.  

One is left to wonder if this is clever politics or a genuine attempt to balance the budget. Since Legal Aid work often involves representing those with little or no means to file an effective defence or bring a case to the courts, it is inconceivable to imagine any so called 'blood-sucking lawyer' working in this field should they be only interested in financial gains. The plan to slash nearly £2 billion from the Justice budget include possible changes to legal aid in criminal law, fee cuts of up to 17.5%, price-competitive tendering for Legal Aid contracts and clients no longer being able to choose their own defence lawyer. Lawyers in Wales have decided upon strike action in protest. 

Last week, the Guardian highlighted issues relating to further cuts in the legal aid budget aimed at prisoners wishing to complain. Earlier in April, the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling had announced that prisoners should not be entitled to state funding on unnecessary complaints about the prison system. In defence of his boss, Justice Minister Tom McNally responded in a letter to the Guardian citing that the original article was confused about the nature of these proposed cuts, and that 'the prison discipline procedures and probation complaints system were also available for issues to be resolved efficiently and effectively'. The very cogent response to this letter came from representatives of the Prisoners Advice Service, Association of Prison Lawyers & Howard League for Penal Reform amongst others, arguing that 'the recent government announcements seek to remove is any effective funding for the majority of legal issues faced by prisoners, such as all internal disciplinary measures like governor adjudications and segregation, the separation of mothers and babies in the specialist mother and baby units, and any resettlement issues'. 

There had been a number of interesting debates during the week on prisons, prisoners and probation ranging from how can prisoners 'work harder' when they've got nothing to do, cutting prisoners' privileges will add to the pressures in jail, when the people running the prisons make a profit from the prisoners, prison populations do not go down, why prison uniforms are a bad idea based on evidence that they are a serious threat to attempts at rehabilitation and that the only effective solution to cutting the number of youth offenders is state-funded young offenders' institutions offering more education. These debates are not going to go away any time soon.

Four Minutes and two seconds is a long dream but it would appear that a recent survey by the hotel chain Travelodge suggests that lawyers are among the nation's biggest day dreamers with 8 in 10 claiming that such dreams about potential success help them edge ever closer to the brink of Rumpolesque legal victory. Such dreams are always a pleasant break away from the harsh reality of cuts, ABS challengers and Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates, and should they lead to broadening the client base as Swiss lawyer Antoine Goetschel has pulled off, daydreams are a welcoming antidote to the dreary winter that we have at long last left behind.      

The purpose of this column is to take a serious look at what happened in the business of law within UK as reported by online legal publications throughout last week.


The most interesting articles on developments, compliance, business of law within UK or as well as international developments of interest to UK law firms and legal practioners: 
 

Interesting articles on the study of law, legal training, pupillage and legal academia: 



Articles of the week:

The UK and international articles of the week are pieces selected by @TheLawMap tweeting team based on recommendations from friends and followers of LawNewsIndex.com daily law news blog.


  • English Pen: we've got a defamation bill but it's how we act that matters | Jo Glanville - Guardian Media Blog  
  • Would a new law narrow the gap between rich and poor? | David Cornock - BBC Wales   
  • Copyright law: Five ways to protect authorship | Alastair Reid - Journalism.co.uk 
  • Casteism equal to racism? UK law holds key | Subodh Ghildiyal - Times of India 
  • Should parliament give itself more powers? Privilege such as free speech is surprisingly limited | Joshua Rozenberg | Guardian Law 
  • Fifth of Brits don’t familiarise themselves with foreign laws | Staff Reporter - Travelbite.co.uk 
  • Clothed in Misery: Latest deady chapter in the story of miserable labor conditions in the global garment industry | M T Anderson - The New York Times  
  • Discrimination: Ageism factor faces critical legal test in the UK | Gill Plimmer - Financial Times 

News from the Law Firms, Chambers & ABS: 

Friday 3rd May
Thursday 2nd May
Wednesday 1st May
Tuesday 30th April
Monday 29th April

 

We would like to thank all the publications cited in this week's column. Please notify via @TheLawMap Twitter handle of any errors or omissions.

 

TheLawMap Publications at a glance: 
LawNewsIndex.com - Daily Law News Archive
SundayLawReview.com - Weekly Law Business News Blog
Law Specials - A compendium of articles and interviews on Justice & Society
Wig - Daily Newspaper Focusing on Law & Society
MetaLawIndex - Informal Blog chronicling life behind the scene at LawNewsIndex & Twitter

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