THIS ISSUE
Claimants: smile for the camera; costs risks of will challenge; bye bye holiday lets; costs schedules unappealing.
Civil procedure continues to evolve with a distinctly practical edge. In his latest 'Civil way' column for NLJ, Stephen Gold highlights how courts are resisting technical traps—from overlooking missing costs schedules to admitting late surveillance evidence where no ‘ambush’ arises
Should police personnel disclose membership of the Freemasons? Neil Parpworth explores a telling case
Government plans to slash Crown Court delays by cutting jury trials face mounting criticism. In NLJ this week, Michael Zander KC warns proposals to shift cases to magistrates’ courts could ‘make the present very bad situation even worse’
Michael Zander KC on the Courts & Tribunals Bill
Pathfinder courts—renamed ‘Child focused courts’—are to be rolled out nationally, following a successful pilot where backlogs halved and cases were resolved up to seven and a half months faster
The Court of Appeal has unanimously dismissed a £385,000 costs order against a father, in a case that centred on what is required to meet the threshold of ‘reprehensible or unreasonable’ behaviour
Centuries-old burial laws would be overhauled, under Law Commission proposals to address the burgeoning problem of shortage of cemetery space
The government has committed an extra £32m to women’s charities and services tackling addiction, trauma, abuse and homelessness
MOVERS & SHAKERS
Harneys—Maggie Kwok & George Weston
Harneys senior leadership appointments
Freeths—Keith Browne & Jim Jordan
Freeths strengthens London Construction and Engineering practice with two strategic senior hires
Anthony Collins—Laura Moss
Anthony Collins announces strategic hire to deepen skills base in the social business sector
NEWS
Existing defamation law can respond to AI ‘hallucinations’, but allocating responsibility will prove harder where outputs reach users without human intervention
The High Court has upheld a rare successful serious-irregularity challenge after an arbitrator relied on an implied term neither party had advanced
Thirty years after The Future of Law shook a profession still using fax machines, its central forecast looks increasingly less like prophecy and more like description
More than 100 teams from the legal and financial services sectors competed in five sports at the 51st Law Society RFC Festival of Sport earlier this month
Part-time status need only be an effective cause of less favourable treatment, rather than the sole cause, the Supreme Court has held in Augustine v Data Cars
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