Cab Rank Rules or Bar Room Brawls?

The late lamented Bobby Robson once said of Craig Bellamy, he could start an argument in an empty room with himself that lad. And I am left with that same feeling myself on reading the recent newsletter from Chair of the Criminal Bar Association on an LSB commissioned report on the rationale behind the Cab …

Access to Justice and ABS: Salvation on its way?

It is a depressing time for access to justice.  Legal aid is being cut; the more general market for legal services is depressed; and – if Jackson and the legal aid cuts have the predicted effect – it about to get more depressed.  So it was with interest that I stumbled across Salvos Legal, a …

Time to collect settlement data for personal injury cases?

Richard Zorza's an excellent and prolific blogger on access to justice in the US. He has highlighted an issue around settlement mills in personal injury cases. We'd call them factories. He's drawing on a paper by Nora Engstrom. Interestingly, there is much more of a debate in the US about settlement information than there is …

Litigants in Person: making the best of a bad job

The Civil Justice Council Working Party on Self-Represented Litigants has reported.  It's an excellent report, contains a range of potential improvements to the way courts and judges work with litigants in person, whilst not pulling its punches on the potential impact of legal aid cuts.  An excellent early post on it by Adam Wagner is …

The Family Justice Review: ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good headline’

Guestpost: Network on Family, Regulation and Society (The Network is an inter-disciplinary group of social-legal researchers in Family Law from the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter)* It was no doubt inevitable that the media coverage of the recommendations from the Family Justice Review chaired by David Norgrove would reflect the positions that the press, and …

Norgrove highlights flawed legal aid plans

The Family Justice Review Final Report (The Norgrove Report) is out.  It contains a wide-ranging set of proposals but given my interest in legal aid and litigants in person, and the limited time I have had to look at it, I’ll concentrate on those issues.  The timing of publication is interesting given the main House …

A Welsh Jurisdiction? Time to experiment??

I confess to some ambivalence about the Welsh Government's announcement that they are pondering greater steps towards a Welsh Jurisdiction. My main intuition is this is something which is good for Welsh lawyers (and so for Welsh law schools), but of more questionable benefit to the individuals and businesses of Wales. Significant democratic benefits aside, …

Paterson, Hamlyn and the Separation of Regulation and Representation

Alan Paterson’s Hamlyn Lectures, Lawyers and the Public Good raise a number of very interesting questions about the future of professionalism post-Legal Services Act.  Alan is a passionate advocate of the importance of professionalism whom I have had the privilege of working with over very many years.  His brand of professionalism recognises the need to …

Compensation Culture FactCheck In Perspective

Compensation culture has been a frequently studied concept on this blog. As even Lord Young has been forced to admit, the concept is a pretty flakey one.  He walked the compensation culture not real, fear of compensation culture real line.  Compensation culture real or imagined is a rather nebulous idea but if we take Compensation …

Legal Aid – System Failure or Broken Law?

This piece argues that those interested in access to justice have to move beyond seeing legal aid as the problem and look more fundamentally at the nature of law and legal institutions. We need to consider radical redesign of dispute resolution processes, not simply the tacking on of ADR and we should to consider radical …