solicitors

The Solicitors Regulation Authority (like the trendy lot they are they don't use the apostrophe that good grammar demands) seems utterly determined to set itself at odds with the profession it regulates. A litany of complaints against its seemingly never-ending list of demands, many of which are costly, is playing out over the requirement that solicitors' practices with a website add a so-called "badge" to their website. The SRA seems to be functioning in a dangerous state of ignorance and arrogance. Solicitors are growling but they are toothless in the face of an autocratic and often incompetent regulator.

A report in The Law Society's Gazette about a male Judge's comments to a women's group meeting has raised the hackles of working men in the solicitor's branch in England and Wales. So who is to blame? The judge for making the comments that can be rightly regarded as sexist or the Law Society which after decades of being "right on" or whatever the current phrase may have finally gone too far in its apparent approval of the Judge's comments? Or perhaps both.,

The Solicitors' Disciplinary Tribunal (which, trendily, omits the apostrophe when it writes its own name) has levied its largest fine ever. Like the previous largest, it's against the London office of a US law firm.

Simon Spence wants to be the next Vice Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association of England and Wales. Not only does he stand on a platform of disparaging solicitors, he does it in such a way that he felt the need to clarify his comments. Surely an accomplished advocate should be expected to be clear the first time, to say what he means and to mean what he says? Then the next question is how can someone who fails those basic tests, with a failure he himself demonstrates by his attempts at correction, can be trusted in a position of high-office within a major professional body?

It used to be that the solicitors branch of the legal profession in England and Wales was compelled to purchase its professional indemnity insurance (PII) from a single, approved, insurer and the cost was very high. Rightly, the profession voted to widen the scheme to permit approved PII to be purchased from third party insurers on a competitive level. But things have not gone according to plan and the latest crisis threatens the future of several firms.

There are those who misguidedly think that the world would be better off without lawyers. The UK legal profession's problem is that it has for so long abandoned its long-standing principles that it's become utterly rotten from within. Add in the deliberate destruction of the profession by successive governments and it's no surprise that there is a crisis from which few will emerge unscathed.

There are those who misguidedly think that the world would be better off without lawyers. The UK legal profession's problem is that it has for so long abandoned its long-standing principles that it's become utterly rotten from within. Add in the deliberate destruction of the profession by successive governments and it's no surprise that there is a crisis from which few will emerge unscathed.

It's all becoming a little too Orwellian. When the previous, Labour government created the "Ministry of Justice" it sounded more 1984 than we were comfortable with. After all, the whole point of the various ministries in the book is to deliver the opposite of what their name promised. Recent changes to costs are removing access to justice except for those that can pay.

And it's all building up to look like a raid on solicitors' firms.