Former Scottish Law Society president Alan Boyd has been recruited as public sector director of Glasgow firm McGrigor Donald. President of the society in 1995, Boyd was head of legal services at the Irvine Development Corporation until it was wound-up in March. McGrigor Donald said it was looking to expand its public sector work and […]
THE INDEPENDENCE of lawyers and judges throughout the UK is to come under scrutiny during an impending visit to the UK by a special UN envoy. A request by Param Cumaraswamy, the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, to visit the UK, has already been granted by the UK government, although […]
ANNE Rafferty QC has stood down as chair of the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) bringing “eight-and-a-half-years of unpaid service to the profession” to a close. Rafferty, a forthright critic of the last government’s crime policies and once widely tipped as a future Bar Council chair, handed over the leadership of the CBA to fraud specialist […]
Bevan Ashford is advising Newbury College on its plans to build a 9
Barrie Barker was born in Liverpool on 13 January 1943. He is a consultant lawyer at Collyer-Bristow. What was your first job? Delivering newspapers. What was your first ever salary as a lawyer? £1,250 per annum. What would you have done if you hadn’t become a lawyer? Landscape gardener. Which law could you live without? […]
The future of the compulsory minimum salary for trainee solicitors hangs by a thread. On Thursday, the Law Society council will debate the issue and decide whether or not to endorse the Training Committee’s recommendation that the 15-year-old minimum salary be retained. This is one of the most important matters to come before the council […]
It is with dismay but no surprise that I learn of the threatened referral by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) of the Standard Mortgage instructions to the Restrictive Trade Practices Court. While the scramble for cover by the establishment is perhaps inevitable, it is time that the views so vigorously opined by the regulators […]
Chicago firm Mayer Brown & Platt is to run its international practice from London following a management committee’s decision last month. Partner Jeff Gordon is returning to London in July to co-ordinate international strategy for all areas from Latin America to South East Asia.
Nottingham law firm Freeth Cartwright Hunt Dickins has poached two intellectual property lawyers from rival firm Eversheds’ office. Helen Driscoll joins the practice as an associate partner and Martin West joins as an assistant. Driscoll says Freeth Cartwright Hunt Dickens sees IP “as a potential growth area”. It now has six lawyers in its IP […]
Barbara Hewson believes the weight of law was behind the rights of the woman in the recent case where a husband sought to prevent his estranged wife from having an abortion. Barbara Hewson is a barrister at Littman Chambers, 12 Gray’s Inn Square. The recent battle between Lynne Kelly and her estranged husband in the […]
A TREATY to prevent the misuse of genetic information is to be presented to United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan this month in New York when he opens the International Bar Association’s 50th anniversary celebrations. Annan and Al Gore, the US vice-president, are the keynote speakers at the three-day celebrations being held at the UN’s […]
Thanks to the Serious Fraud Office, corrupt shipping tycoon Abbas Gokal will spend until at least 2001 in prison for his part in defrauding Bank of Credit and Commerce International customers of their life savings. But those of us charged with the job of trying to catch fraudsters need to learn our lessons a lot […]