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11 April 2019 / Steve Hynes
Issue: 7836 / Categories: Opinion , Legal aid focus , Profession
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Shine on! Legal aid at 70

The MoJ is travelling in the right direction but is it too little too late, asks Steve Hynes

It’s 70 years since the modern legal aid system was founded, and Legal Action Group (LAG) celebrated this auspicious occasion with a conference in London last week attended by the great and the good from the legal aid world.

A packed first plenary session heard from Baroness Hale,the president of the Supreme Court. Lady Hale is a long-time supporter of the charity who has described herself in the past as ‘a LAG generation lawyer.’ Her speech focused on family law, and she used a hypothetical example of a woman from Richmond, North Yorkshire—where she went to school—who had experienced domestic violence. She listed the websites and other sources of information the woman could use to navigate her way through the legal system and concluded the help available added up to ‘a patchy picture’ and that ‘technology solutions can help but they cannot replace proper advice from a skilled person.’ Lady Hale also said

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Children can claim for ‘lost years’ damages in personal injury cases, the Supreme Court has held in a landmark judgment
The cab-rank rule remains a bulwark of the rule of law, yet lawyers are increasingly judged by their clients’ causes. Writing in NLJ this week, Ian McDougall, president of the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation, warns that conflating representation with endorsement is a ‘clear and present danger’
Holiday lets may promise easy returns, but restrictive covenants can swiftly scupper plans. Writing in NLJ this week, Andrew Francis of Serle Court recounts how covenants limiting use to a ‘private dwelling house’ or ‘private residence’ have repeatedly defeated short-term letting schemes
Artificial intelligence (AI) is already embedded in the civil courts, but regulation lags behind practice. Writing in NLJ this week, Ben Roe of Baker McKenzie charts a landscape where AI assists with transcription, case management and document handling, yet raises acute concerns over evidence, advocacy and even judgment-writing
The Supreme Court has drawn a firm line under branding creativity in regulated markets. In Dairy UK Ltd v Oatly AB, it ruled that Oatly’s ‘post-milk generation’ trade mark unlawfully deployed a protected dairy designation. In NLJ this week, Asima Rana of DWF explains that the court prioritised ‘regulatory clarity over creative branding choices’, holding that ‘designation’ extends beyond product names to marketing slogans
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