Profession

Matthew Nicklin outlines what BSB regulation could entail for those seeking to form advocacy-focused alternative business structures, legal disciplinary practices and barrister-only entities 

The final stage of the Bar Standards Board (BSB) consultation on entity regulation –New handbook and entity regulation – closed on 28 June 2012. After working its way through the responses, a report will be published by the BSB in due course. 

David Wurtzel casts the spotlight on a new niche legal disciplinary practice which specialises in private prosecutions for fraud and corporate crime 

Edmonds Marshall McMahon (EMM) has been operating since March 2012 in the niche area of representing clients who wish to bring private prosecutions for fraud, counterfeiting and corporate crime. At the moment they say they are the only such firm – but they do not expect things to remain that way for long. As a legal disciplinary practice (LDP), the directors consist of a solicitor (dual-qualified in Australia), a barrister who spent nine years in the Government Legal Service (GLS), and a barrister who works within the company while continuing his self-employed practice at the Bar. The company has no relationship with his chambers. 

In the second part of his feature on information security, Graham Cunningham looks at the guidelines regarding physical material.  

Last month, I wrote about your responsibilities under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA 1998), concerning electronic processing of personal information. It was designed for your protection and, most especially to avoid you having to give undertakings to the Information Commissioner or pay fines.  This month, I want to concentrate on physical material; ie, the paper in the lever arch files that makes up the average brief.   Generally speaking, the sort of physical material you get in the average brief does not come within DPA 1998. 

Dan Jones and Dominic Thomas from criminal law set, Artesian Law, explain why they have chosen to go down the ABS route 

As six members of a traditional criminal set – of between 12 and 34 years of call – it became increasingly clear to us that the chambers structure is, in many respects, out-dated, uncompromising and struggling to cope with the challenges that face us all in practice as members of the self-employed Bar. We didn’t want to get left behind as we waited for a conservative management committee, leading a large group of uncertain barristers, each with a vote as to the way forward, to catch up with events. 

On the 27 July, the Legal Services Board consented to a change in the Cab Rank Rule of the Bar Code of Conduct to replace the current Terms of Work with new standard contractual terms. The practical effect of the changes will be as follows: 

1. The Terms of Work on which barristers offer their services to solicitors and the Withdrawal of Credit scheme (the most common basis of instruction), as reproduced in Annexe G1 of the current Code of Conduct, together with the contractual version of those Terms at Annexe G2, will be abolished. 

Barristers in the new legal landscape must ensure they provide clients with clear advice on pricing and funding options and a clear route to redress, says Chief Legal Ombudsman, Adam Sampson 

The vernacular in legal circles has referred to a “changing” legal sector so often in recent times that the phrase has inevitably become somewhat hackneyed. Since the Legal Services Act 2007 (LSA 2007) came into being, we’ve all been anticipating a big shift, one that would send us towards a full-blown commercially driven legal sector. 

William Hughes and Bobbie Cheema outline the raison d’être of the Kalisher Scholarship Foundation 

Cuts to the legal aid budget preceded the global banking crisis and the age of austerity, and over the past ten years the number of pupillages has nosedived, from 695 in 2000 to 450 in 2010/11. Given the increasing difficulty in securing a publicly-funded pupillage the Kalisher trustees, together with professional training outfit Jo Ouston and Co, recently ran the first Kalisher presentation skills course. 

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 introduces contingency fees into main-stream litigation. Timothy Mayer considers whether this change also brings with it a potential adverse costs risks for lawyers where a claim is unsuccessful.
 

In a two part feature, Graham Cunningham looks at the new guidelines  on Information Security; in part 1, he examines the guidelines  regarding electronic devices.  

There is good news; and there is bad news. The good news is that there are only two or three barristers on the ‘ICO list’. The bad news, in these harsh economic times, is that you could be spending a lot of your increasingly hard-earned cash on paying administrative penalties to the Government. 

Jacqueline Kinghan, Director of Clinical Legal Education at UCL Faculty of Laws, examines the continuing role of the undergraduate law degree in the light of the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR). 

The Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) recently published a discussion paper with suggestions for simplifying the structure of legal education and ensuring it is fit for purpose. The proposals – including whether to abolish the qualifying law degree – have re-ignited the all too familiar skills versus scholarship debate in legal education. Several leading academics have criticised the LLB as a poor combination of a liberal arts programme with arbitrarily-selected technical legal skills. In some camps, a graduate programme or Bar Exam like that in the US has been a suggested preferred course. Rebecca Huxley-Binns at NTU appears to favour the retention of the degree but proposes that the core subjects be taught around ‘intellectual professional legal skills’ such as drafting, writing, reasoning and commercial awareness.