Features

John Curtis investigates the use of Shakespeare’s quotes in legal judgments 

Richard Jones QC meets the President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, Professor Terence Stephenson 

David Wurtzel meets Dominic Grieve QC MP 

While his colleagues have been emphasising how different they will be from the Labour Minister who came before them, the new Attorney General, Dominic Grieve QC MP, prefers to see the development of the law officers’ role as “seamless”. When we met in his Victoria Street office in late July, he explained that he looked back to his Tory predecessors, Patrick Mayhew and Nicholas Lyell. 

Sam Stein QC explains why it’s time to regulate advocacy.  

Consumers are used to making decisions in all aspects of their lives based on their perception of the quality of particular goods or services. They are able to take comfort that consumer goods have been through rigorous checks and are signed off as being fit for purpose before they are sold. The consumer also believes that professionals such as accountants or financial advisers have achieved standards set by their professional bodies and undertaken regular assessments to ensure that they meet the standards expected of them, as do the firm in which they operate. 

QC competency interviews can make even the smoothest lawyers trip up, believes James Hutchinson.  

Mark* peers at me over his spectacles, a look of mild horror spreading over his face. He’s an experienced, successful Chancery counsel in his early 40s and everything I expected: smooth talking, confident and urbane. Five minutes earlier, Mark had wafted confidently into his room in chambers. This is a man who spends his life speaking in court or telling the rich and influential what they can and can’t do. And yet here he was: speechless. 

Can this year’s landmark 25th Annual Bar Conference grapple with the mounting challenges facing the Bar and reinvigorate those who feel most battle weary? Definitely, say Kim Hollis QC and Toby Craig.  

It’s fitting that the Bar Conference sees its silver Jubilee during a year of historical and potentially radical changes for the entire legal profession. When else can every individual involved in the business of the Bar come together and help influence the future of all our careers? 

Jonathan Herring claims that it is a divorce lawyer’s world 

James Roebuck reports on the recent Birmingham Aimhigher Conference “How to get to the Bar”.  

On 12 July 2010 some 80 sixth form students from schools and colleges across the West Midlands region, Cheshire and the Wirral, attended a Bar Council-Aimhigher widening participation conference entitled “How to get to the Bar”, at St Philips Chambers in Birmingham. 

David Wurtzel meets Adam Sampson, the Chief Ombudsman and Chief Executive of the Legal Ombudsman, the new scheme established by the Office of Legal Complaints to handle consumer legal complaints 

From investment management to investment madness?  

Graham Nutter, the owner of the Chateau St Jacques d’Albas vineyard in France, on why and how he got into the wine business.