First comparison site for legal services soon to break cover

From the Law Society Gazette 21/01/10:

CompareLegalSolutions [dot] com, to be launched in March, claims it will allow consumers to compare firms on price across 90 areas of law.

Prices will be displayed as fixed fees where applicable; otherwise, each firm’s average hourly rate for the chosen field of work will be shown. The website will charge law firms a monthly fee to access leads to civil legal aid work and a set fee per lead for private work such as wills and conveyancing. Managing director Thomas Dunlop said: ‘The prospect of accessing legal services as easily as buying a tin of beans will make the market a lot more price- conscious.’

I guess it was only a matter of time before the comparison site fever spread to the legal profession.  As far back as two years ago, there was a well-acknowledged joke that there were so many new comparison sites bursting onto the scene, you needed a comparison site for comparison sites.

On the face of it, giving consumers greater access to a means of comparing prices is a good idea but price is not always a good guide to quality.  For bog standard work - conveyancing and the like - I suppose this might make some sense.  Competition in the personal injury sphere is also notoriously high - as illustrated by the vast array of PI related adverts which populate the web and daytime TV.  For more complicated work, however, it may make little sense to automatically go with the firm quoting the lowest price. 

Ultimately, Law firms which build up a strong reputation for excellent service but who perhaps charge a little extra than the cheapest firm out there are always going to do well when attracting business.

Finally, as an aside, I've noticed that 3 out of the 4 F1 sites which I regularly visit, are all plastered with the same ad touting the services of a well-known firm of national personal injury solicitors.  What is it about readers who frequent F1 sites: are they particularly accident prone?

Windows 7 Battery Woes Completely Disproved

From Paul Thurrott (SuperSite for Windows) 09/02/10:

Microsoft on Monday issued a lengthy statement about the recent Windows 7 battery controversy, echoing my assessment from earlier in the day but backing it up with cold, hard evidence. Put simply, Windows 7 is not responsible for any battery life issues that customers have reported via its support forums.

"Windows 7 is correctly warning [about] batteries that are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state," Microsoft president Steven Sinofsky wrote in the Engineering Windows 7 Blog. "We are seeing nothing more than the normal course of battery degradation over time ... In every case we have been able to identify the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement."

I can’t say I’ve noticed any negative effects with using Windows 7 on a laptop (that previously ran XP) battery-related or otherwise. I’m still rather in awe of the fact I’ve successfully installed Windows 7 on my 5 year old Sony Vaio laptop and seems to run it as well as it well as it did XP.  I run Windows 7 across all of my PCs now and have absolutely no complaints.  On my laptop, the battery life certainly seems comparable with what I was getting under XP.

That this story grew so big in the first place is a testimony to people’s naiveté coupled with a truck-load of scaremongering.

Judicial Conservatism

From the Solicitors Journal 03/02/10:

A man who admitted deceiving a council by building on green belt land in Hertfordshire a ‘barn’ containing a three-bedroom house and a gym, has won his battle for planning permission at the Court of Appeal.

Lord Justice Mummery said that decent law-abiding citizens would find the unanimous ruling “incomprehensible” but, on the basis of legal arguments, Alan Beesley’s appeal had to be allowed.

Mummery LJ said it was a “surprising outcome” that “a public authority, deceived into granting planning permission by a dishonest planning application, can be required by law to issue an official certificate to the culprit consolidating the fruits of the fraud”.

He went on: “If a public authority behaved in a deceitful way, its planning decisions would rightly be set aside by the court as an unlawful abuse of power.

“If, however, the public authority has been deceived it seems that it can be required, at the end of the requisite four-year period, to provide the person who deceived it with a certificate of lawfulness.”

Giving judgment in Welwyn Hatfield Council v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and Beesley [2010] EWCA Civ 26, Mummery LJ said Beesley told the council he proposed to build a new hay barn on the land, that no change of use was required and provision for sewage disposal was not needed.

This sounds remarkably like the story I blogged about 2 years ago in which a chap came up with a rather fanciful  method of circumventing planning laws – he hid a castle for which he’d not obtained planning permission behind a massive wall of hay bales for 4 years and then tried to claim there had been no objection to the building for the requisite period.  There, in the interests of justice, the presiding judge adopted a liberal view of the process of dismantling the hay bales to the effect that it constituted part of the ‘building process’ meaning the 4 year period had not elapsed.

Here, however, the court was not so creative in their reasoning:

Lord Justice Richards, who gave the leading judgment, said the court should not adopt a “strained construction” of section 171B of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 in reaction to the “deliberate deceit” practised by Mr Beesley.

“The outcome should be the same as if, for example, there had been a genuine change of mind in the course of construction of a building for which planning permission had been obtained in good faith.

“The question is whether the situation, viewed objectively, is one for which the statute has provided a four-year time limit or a ten-year time limit. If it is considered that there should be a different outcome in a case of dishonesty or deliberate concealment, it is for Parliament to amend the legislation accordingly.”

This presupposes, of course, that that the Act, when drafted, was intended to wave through instances of dishonesty or deliberate concealment quite happily.  I’m not sure how much I like that logic.

You probably won’t find a better example of judicial conservatism for quite some time.  To my mind, it’s simply a case of the literal rule being chosen in favour of the golden or mischief rules – both of which would surely have allowed for a more equitable outcome.

I’m sure the late Denning LJ would have had a field day with this one!!

Graduation Time

I've got my graduation for my LLM coming up next week which should be interesting.  Personally, I don't think that holding it in the depths of winter is a great idea – and is causing my GF no end of trouble when trying decide on her outfit.  

I remember graduation time last year and just what disruption it caused: my competition seminar had to decamp over to the maths faculty at the far-flung reaches of the campus as our usual room had been suddenly made-over as a photo studio.  There were people milling about every which way and getting anywhere within the law school was a huge struggle.

It seems strange to have the ceremony so long after the degree was, to all intents and purposes, done and dusted. Things have moved on considerably since I submitted my dissertation last September: we've moved house, I've a new job, am thoroughly out of 'student mode' and, well, my LLM seems like a distant memory.  But a very pleasant one.

We went back into my university city yesterday on a shopping spree. One of the shops was virtually next to the law school so it was the first time I'd been 'back on track' as it were, since exam period last summer.  Walking that route brought back a lot of good memories from my LLM.  :D

I was thinking a while back, if I'd do it all again - knowing what I know now.  To go through the pain, hassle and sacrifice; trying to fit the endless studying around my part-time job at the time; the extra expense; the added stress. 

In fairness, though, it didn't take a whole lot of thinking about.  Of course I'd do it again!

Like a shot!!  :D

Left-handed ridicule

Being a leftie myself, I’ve long had to suffer the ridiculous and trite comments that people make when they see you’re left handed. 

So I can certainly relate to this graph which I stumbled across on Digg but, for me, the most frequent response I hear is:

“oh, so you’re a leftie/left-handed, then?”

To which I usually reply something like:

“There’s no getting past you, is there?” or “only on Tuesdays and Thursdays” or something equally ridiculous.

I’ve never considered myself a fully-fledged leftie, though.  I write with my left hand, am a left handed sportsman (except when I try and pick a fight because the game didn’t go my way) but I’ve always used scissors in my right hand and a computer mouse.

Of course, this doesn’t make me ambidextrous – just a bit mixed-up and awkward, I guess.  As my music-come-cricket teacher used to describe me, “right handed musician, left handed bat". 

I wasn’t much use at either though.  Perhaps I should have swapped around!!

What’s wrong with age-restriction training in retail

 

From the Telegraph 02/02/10:

Christine Cuddihy, 24, was stunned when a checkout assistant refused to sell her the 51p piece of cheese and onion tart because “she looked under 21”.

In the end Miss Cuddihy, who was hungry, produced her driving licence in order to make the purchase.

She said: “The girl told me: 'You don't look over 21. I need to see some proof of age.'

''I told her I was certain the proof of age laws do not apply to quiche but she just said: 'We have to be really strict now and this applies to quiche bought over the counter.'

I know this one has been doing the rounds a lot in the last couple of days. I first read about it in the trusty Metro on my way to work on Wednesday and I know a couple of other blawgers have picked up on it.

For me, this story highlights everything that’s wrong with age-restricted goods training ran by companies.  Employees are typically given a 5 second blast of ‘you can’t do this or else…’  in which employers try and put the fear of God into their employees without imparting a grounding of why and how that training should properly be put into practice.

If a touch more time was taken, the true reasons behind why these age restricted laws are in place were explained and more trouble taken to explore the context in which those laws apply, not only will the employees leave with a better understanding of the problems that age restrictions are intended to combat but it would stop silliness like this from occurring in the first place.

Also, for employees to engage their brain whilst at work tends to help a lot.  ID-ing someone over a quiche – I mean, honestly!!!???

Solicitors From Hell -- Real life experience

A curious little matter dropped onto my desk last week - one of many at the moment, actually; there just don't seem enough working hours in the day.

Essentially, it seems that we provided communication services to firm of solicitors who are now subject to an Intervention under s35 and Schedule 1 of the Solicitors Act 1974.  We were approached by the firm who are acting as Intervention Agents on behalf of the Solicitors Regulation Authority to confirm detailed information about our client and re-direct their phone lines to the offices of the Intervention Agents. Initially, I found out, these requests were made via a phone call to the support dept. and then, when information was not forthcoming from that member of staff, a firmly word fax hinting that they were on the cusp of applying for a court order to compel us to provide the information required.

Being the most cautious of all risk-averse people, my data protection spiny senses were initially sent into overdrive at the mere thought of all this.

I did a little research as to exactly what our obligations were, checked out the firm acting as Intervention Agents and the firm being investigated.  My preliminary research bore their fax and phone calls out.

A quick flick through the Solicitors Act didn't seem to reveal anything as to what our obligations were to provide this information and how it sat with the relevant Data Protection legislation. I was left with no alternative then, than a rummage through the depths of the Data Protection Act, something I hadn’t done in well over a year, since early on in my LLM. It didn’t take me long to find that this situation pretty much fell squarely under s31 of the Act, covering exemptions from the Subject Information Provisions in relation to regulatory activity.

So that was more or less that then.  I was shocked at how prominently the firm being investigated featured on the web from previous clients who’d had their fingers burnt.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, I also found that they were featured on the Solicitors From Hell website. I’d not heard of this site until last Thursday; since then, I’ve noticed that Charon QC and Aimless Wanderer have both mentioned it. I should imagine that a lot of lay people out there believe that all firms of solicitors should feature on that site!!

Still, this bit of excitement made a change from drafting and reviewing endless contracts, resolving number portability conundrums and advising on stuff under the Communications Act – plus strategising how to prod, poke or otherwise coerce OFCOM into action over a specific issue.