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Private eye

09 January 2015 / Tom Morrison
Issue: 7635 / Categories: Features , Data protection , Freedom of Information
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Tom Morrison returns with his quarterly review of the world of information law

2015 is a year for anniversaries. A ridiculous comment perhaps as by their nature all years are a year for anniversaries. What I mean is that as we start a new year having just celebrated the 30th anniversary of England and Wales’ first—albeit largely irrelevant—Data Protection Act, we are now commemorating 10 years of the full force of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FIA 2000). I have not got my dates wrong; it took five years to implement. This ground-breaking piece of legislation was far from irrelevant—how can anything described by a former Prime Minister as one of his biggest mistakes be irrelevant—and it marked a new era for the right of the public to know more about the decisions public authorities make in all our names.

March also represents the fifteenth anniversary of our first genuinely meaningful piece of data protection legislation—the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA 1998—which took nearly two years to be activated). DPA 1998 was a watershed

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MOVERS & SHAKERS

Cadwalader—Andro Atlaga

Cadwalader—Andro Atlaga

Firm strengthens leveraged finance team with London partner hire

Mourant—Stephen Alexander

Mourant—Stephen Alexander

Jersey litigation lead appointed to global STEP Council

mfg Solicitors—nine trainees

mfg Solicitors—nine trainees

Firm invests in future talent with new training cohort

NEWS
The Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment in July that overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, once poster boys of the Libor and Euribor scandal. In NLJ this week, Neil Swift of Peters & Peters considers what the ruling means for financial law enforcement
Small law firms want to embrace technology but feel lost in a maze of jargon, costs and compliance fears, writes Aisling O’Connell of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in this week's NLJ
Charles Pigott of Mills & Reeve reports on Haynes v Thomson, the first judicial application of the Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling in a discrimination claim, in this week's NLJ
Bea Rossetto of the National Pro Bono Centre makes the case for ‘General Practice Pro Bono’—using core legal skills to deliver life-changing support, without the need for niche expertise—in this week's NLJ
Charlie Mercer and Astrid Gillam of Stewarts crunch the numbers on civil fraud claims in the English courts, in this week's NLJ. New data shows civil fraud claims rising steadily since 2014, with the King’s Bench Division overtaking the Commercial Court as the forum of choice for lower-value disputes
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