A Lawyer Speaks

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com A newly-retired appeal judge has lifted the curtain on what he calls the best job in the world. In The Practice of Judging , published today, Sir Peter Coulson offers advice to would-be judges and explains why in 2019 he refused the Post Office permission to appeal against High Court rulings in favour of wronged p...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com A report out this week says that artificial intelligence tools are weaponising disputes in the family justice system, sycophantically encouraging well-intentioned parents into becoming intransigent litigants. AI is accused of undermining efforts by lawyers to de-escalate conflict while overwhelming judges who them...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com Solicitors’ and barristers’ representatives have expressed concern at plans to increase the fees that lawyers have to pay the legal ombudsman — known as LeO — if complaints against them are upheld. Unless providers of legal services had taken all reasonable steps to resolve a complaint, they could be charged £200,...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com The entire civil and administrative justice system needs to be integrated and reformed, according to a paper published by the Nuffield Foundation this morning. All eight frontline regulators and their oversight regulator should be replaced with a single independent regulator for legal professionals, it adds. Acces...

Our walls are festooned with pictures of old white men, the treasurer (elected head) of Gray’s Inn said last week. Sir Andrew McFarlane was about to redress the balance by unveiling a painting of Edith Hesling (1899-1971) the first woman to be called to the bar by Gray’s — one of the four inns of court that train and support barristers. That was in 1923 and Hesling then established a busy and wide...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal will hold case management hearings today in two cases arising from the Post Office scandal. One involves a former general counsel at the Post Office accused of failing to cooperate with the recent public inquiry. The other involves a solicitor who represented former postmasters...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com Sudan’s military leaders built a stockpile of chemical weapons that they tried to conceal after chlorine bombs had been used against rebel forces, the Washington Post reported on 5 September. Videos, documents and intercepted communications portray a secretive Sudanese military unit said to have produced chlorine-...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com We are not living in an era of change but a change of era, writes Professor Richard Susskind in the 30th anniversary edition of his classic book on the future of law. Describing the emergence of artificial general intelligence — AGI — as the single most significant technological advance in the history of humanity,...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com New legislation is needed to regulate the use of artificial intelligence, a parliamentary committee recommends today. The joint committee on human rights says the law should prohibit the development and provision of very powerful AI systems known as artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com Who’s to blame for the Post Office scandal that saw innocent postmasters sent to prison for crimes which never happened? The lawyers accused of keeping Post Office executives in the dark? Or the Post Office executives accused of setting up lawyers to fail? Why didn’t the regulators step in? Are they doing enough n...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com A criminal court built over the course of a weekend “worked absolutely perfectly”, according to inspectors who examined the UK’s military court service. Because courts martial may sit anywhere in the world, the service has a fully equipped “court in a box” that it can set up in any suitable building. Anthony Roger...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com Few British lawyers have a better understanding of genocide than Sir Howard Morrison KCMG CBE KC . In 2016, as a judge of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, he voted to convict the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić on one charge of genocide and acquit him on another. On the latest epis...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com If two people live together for a while — and perhaps share a child — does that give them the same sort of rights as a married couple or civil partners? Most of my readers will know that the law of England and Wales does not recognise so-called common law marriage. But should it? You have three days left to tell t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com Children aged from 10 to 17 are being arrested by the police and detained overnight in adult custody suites because more appropriate responses are not available in England and Wales, a major research project has found . The researchers recommend clearer guidance for police officers and a presumption in favour of l...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com Eleven years ago this month, Sir Christopher Pitchford formally opened the Undercover Policing Inquiry. It was expected to take three years and Pitchford was able to continue sitting as an appeal judge. Nearly two years later he stood down because of ill-health. The former High Court judge Sir John Mitting was app...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com LeO “needs to transform”, his handler said this month . LeO, in this context, is the legal ombudsman and his handler is the chair of the Office for Legal Complaints — which, in turn, reports to the Legal Services Board . One enhancement — if not quite a transformation — is suggested in a report today by Blind Just...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com The Criminal Cases Review Commission is not a failing institution, inspectors said in a report published yesterday . In the 60 cases they examined, caseworkers had reached the right decisions in their recommendations to commissioners. But in too many cases staff investigating suspected miscarriages of justice went...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com “This consultation,” wrote David Lammy just over three weeks ago , “proposes some of the biggest reforms to family law in decades — bringing the law into the 21st century, helping families feel better off and increasing protections for millions.” Top marks if you already know what he’s talking about; family lawyer...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com The employment tribunal system is broken, lawyers dealing with workplace disputes will tell you. It can take three or four years to get a hearing and the delays are expected to get much worse next year. Throwing money at the problem is unlikely to work, even if there was any to spare. But a new academic study of t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com There can’t be many compensation claims with legal costs in the millions and damages in double-digit billions. Perhaps one of them is Trump v BBC — I have updated yesterday’s piece to include the judge’s threat to throw out the case after the president’s lawyers missed a deadline. But not even Donald Trump is clai...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com While ministers insist that the only way of ending delays in the Crown Court is to limit the use of juries, a judge responsible for non-jury trials has achieved what’s been described as an “inspiring success” in reducing backlogs. Through collaboration across the criminal justice system of Scotland, Aisha Anwar KC...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com Gray’s Inn is paying tribute to an illustrious former member, 400 years after his death. Sir Francis Bacon was one of the most influential figures in British intellectual history and a lawyer whose life and career were deeply intertwined with the inn of court where he felt most at home. At a dinner in hall tonight...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com In a judgment published last Thursday , a circuit judge sitting in Walsall explained that he was referring two solicitors to their regulator because false AI-generated case citations had been submitted in an appeal he was hearing. “Lawyers who cite fictitious cases must face serious consequences, ” said Judge Grim...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com As presaged in the King’s speech, the government’s Courts and Tribunals Bill was reintroduced in the House of Commons yesterday. It picks up where it left off, though no date has yet been announced for the bill’s report stage and third reading. Will the government’s plans to limit jury trial ever reach the House o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com The international legal order is facing profound disruption, a leading lawyer said last night. Professor Lord Verdirame KC said that institutions created or expanded after the end of the Cold War in 1989 had “too often responded with misguided moralistic fervour and interpretative maximalism, stretching mandates b...