Legislation

NICHOLAS Green QC, the Chairman of the Bar Council, called on the Government to take a more considered approach to lawmaking as Liberal Democrat Conference delegates came together to consider the repeal of some of the huge number of criminal offences created by the previous Government. 

David Wurtzel meets Dominic Grieve QC MP 

While his colleagues have been emphasising how different they will be from the Labour Minister who came before them, the new Attorney General, Dominic Grieve QC MP, prefers to see the development of the law officers’ role as “seamless”. When we met in his Victoria Street office in late July, he explained that he looked back to his Tory predecessors, Patrick Mayhew and Nicholas Lyell. 

“I am more inclined to judicial discretion than some of my predecessors”, the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, Ken Clarke QC, declared to the Justice Select Committee on 21 July 2010. 

Nick Green QC issues a warning about the Comprehensive Spending Review 

Stephen Hockman QC argues the case for a written constitution 

Direct access across the board is inevitable for the Bar, according to the Chairman of the Bar Council. 

Defendants are now required to provide written notice of the witnesses they seek to call at trial. Monica Stevenson considers the likely pitfalls 

Over the last decade criminal practitioners have been greeted with a deluge of legislation, the effect of which has been to increase case workloads at the same time as the government has panicked over the cost of paying lawyers to deal with it all.  Continuing the trend is the new requirement that defendants provide written notification of those witnesses they intend to call at trial. This change is ushered in by virtue of s 6(c) of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 (“CPIA”) (as amended by s 34 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (“CJA 2003”)) which entered the statute books seven years ago but only came into force on 1 May 2010. It is accompanied by regulations, the Notification of Intention to Call Defence Witnesses (Time Limits) Regulations 2010, SI 2010/214 (“the 2010 Regulations”), and a Code of Practice for Conducting Interviews of Witnesses Notified by the Accused (“the Code”). 

The Bar Council is seeking views on the introduction of contractual terms as the standard terms for barristers accepting instructions from solicitors in privately funded matters. Sarah Asplin QC explains why the current system is unsatisfactory.  

Members of the Bar will recall that the Bar Council had been negotiating with the Law Society over many, many years with a view to introducing contractual terms as the standard basis on which barristers accept instructions from solicitors. These terms would replace the present usual terms, namely “The Terms of Work on which Barristers offer their Services to Solicitors and the Withdrawal of Credit Scheme 1988” (as amended), and the rarely used 2001 contractual version of those Terms, which are replicated in Annexes G1 and G2 of the Bar Code of Conduct. 

Justin Rushbrooke argues that the manner in which the last government sought to reduce success fees in defamation cases was ill conceived. The irony is, he says, had a more moderate approach been adopted, meaningful reform would have been possible 

The Conditional Fee Agreements (Amendment) Order 2010, which sought to reduce the maximum “uplift” in defamation and privacy cases from 100 per cent to 10 per cent, had a short and inglorious life. It was ill-considered, rushed through with unseemly haste by the former Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, and his colleagues; and, in the end, counter-productive. As with much of the debate that surrounds media law issues, it was bedevilled by ignorance, exaggeration and muddled thinking. The irony is that had Mr Straw adopted a more moderate approach to what was, on his own account, only supposed to be an interim measure, he would have been able to achieve meaningful reform of a kind that nearly everyone agreed was warranted. But the manner in which it was handled cannot help but give rise to a suspicion that, with a general election looming and a government in need of friends in the media, appearance always mattered more than substance. 

The Bar Standards Board is to conduct a YouGov survey among barristers, clerks and practice managers on their opinions and expectations regarding the new business structures permitted under the Legal Services Act 2007.  The survey will be emailed by YouGov, the Institute of Barristers’ Clerks and the Legal Practice Managers Association.