Legal News

Average wait times for probate are now just over four weeks, HM Courts and Tribunals Service data published this week shows. 

Salary has increased in importance for junior lawyers, with 70% citing it as a key motivation to stay in their current role, according to the Future Lawyers Report 2025, published this month. This compares to 40% who said the same last year, and 21% the year before

Is our criminal appeals system fit for purpose? Jon Robins, NLJ columnist, writes that he recently attended an ‘astonishing press conference’ on the Lucy Letby case, in which the international panel of medical experts, working pro bono, ‘did not equivocate.

Former district judge Stephen Gold highlights some unplanned side-effects of proposed legislation to include the names of claimants in the Register of Judgments, Orders and Fines, in this week’s NLJ.

Welcome to the brave new world of neuropolitics! In this week’s NLJ, Harry Lambert, Outer Temple Chambers, continues his fascinating series on the fast-emerging area of neurorights with a look at free will, our sense of self, individual agency and freedom of thought.

From moths in the attic to the right to manage, 2024 provided a plethora of landmark real estate litigation cases. In this week’s NLJ, Ben Hatton, director of property litigation, Jordan Gulwell, lawyer, and Natasha Vij, trainee solicitor, at Clifford Chance, survey the stand-out cases and set out some lessons to learn from each.

What happened in family law in the last quarter of 2024? A lot, as demonstrated by Ellie Hampson-Jones, senior associate, and Carla Ditz, knowledge development lawyer at Stewarts, authors of NLJ’s family law brief.

In a small road accident claim, do we really need to know the full details of the claimant’s childhood medical history? ‘In modest personal injury claims, routine, unnecessary and inappropriate disclosure of the entirety of claimants’ medical records is not acceptable,’ Charles Davey, a barrister with The Barrister Group, writes in this week’s NLJ.

Three cases concerning contributory action and re-engagement, injury to feelings and blacklisted airline pilots come under scrutiny in this week’s NLJ. Ian Smith, barrister, emeritus professor of employment law at the Norwich Law School, UEA, and author of NLJ’s monthly employment law brief, comments that cases on re-engagement, the first in the trio, are ‘relatively rare’. This case ‘shows how carefully an employment tribunal must construe exactly what is expected of it when considering re-engagement’.

Digital identity services and other reforms will be introduced to streamline searches and speed up conveyancing times, the government has said.