“No-Win, No-Fee” Reforms Delayed
The Ministry of Justice has this week announced that the implementation of its controversial reforms to “no win, no fee” (conditional fee) agreements will be deferred by six months to April 2013.
The reforms, which appear within part two of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, currently at the committee stage in the House of Lords, were expected to be implemented in October this year, and the delay follows one previously announced at the end of last year to the legal aid reforms in part one of the Bill.
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No-Win, No-Fee – No More?
In 1999, changes to the rules on litigation funding opened up the possibility of bringing a wide range of cases under Conditional Fee Agreements (or ‘no-win, no-fee agreements’ as they are colloquially known). At a time of legal aid cuts, the changes were intended to ensure access to justice for all; not just for the wealthy.
Carter-Ruck was one of the firms which pioneered a CFA scheme which over the years has allowed us to act for hundreds of litigants who would not otherwise have been able to afford to bring an action.
2011 Media Law Round-Up
This year has been an extraordinary one for media lawyers, when the balance between privacy rights and freedom of expression has swung wildly from one side to the other. First the furore over so-called “super-injunctions”, when celebrities were vilified for exercising their privacy rights. The sovereignty of parliament and the courts clashed as public figures who had obtained privacy injunctions were named and shamed by parliamentarians protected by the cloak of privilege. Twitter users named celebrities who had “gagging” orders, leading the Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge to warn that modern technology was “out of control” and the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt to say the situation was “bordering on farce”. The Attorney General warned that people who use Twitter to breach privacy injunctions could face legal action for contempt of court. Continue reading
Berezovsky Court Victory
A decision of the Court of Appeal on 15 December 2011 finally brought to an end one of the most fascinating libel cases in recent years. The case, concerning a Russian State television broadcast on the RTR satellite channel about the murder in November 2006 of Alexander Litvinenko, had all the hallmarks of a cold war thriller.
Boris Berezovsky, represented by Carter-Ruck, won £150,000 libel damages against Vladimir Terluk in February 2010; the appeal, which included an attempt to introduce evidence from Andrei Lugovoy, the man wanted by the British authorities for the murder, failed on every count. Continue reading
Reading the Riot Act…
The London riots dominated the news agenda in August. Victims included not just those whose homes and businesses were reprehensibly attacked but also victims of the media coverage itself.
Carter-Ruck represented Bath University undergraduate Merlin O’Doherty-Alb, who had inadvertently become caught up in the troubles when the police charged at a crowd in Camden shortly after he arrived there. A photograph of a street in Camden which included Mr O’Doherty Alb was used by The Independent to illustrate one of its articles about the riots, giving the false impression that Mr O’Doherty-Alb had been a participant in the violence. Continue reading
Increased Protection For Blogging Platforms
Blogging platforms such as WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger received valuable judicial protection last week in the judgment in Davison v Habeeb & Ors [2011] EWHC 3031(QB).
The Judge, HHJ Parkes QC, addressed the question of whether providers of blog platforms could be held liable in English law for content published by bloggers.
The case concerned allegations published in the online newspaper, “The Palestine Telegraph” about the claimant, Andrea Davison. The allegations were later republished by the author and second defendant on his personal website entitled “Peter Eyre’s Space” which was managed by Google’s blogging platform “Blogger”. Davison complained to ‘Google Inc’ as the fifth defendant and requested that the material be removed. Google contacted Eyre who maintained that the allegations were not defamatory. Consequently, Google declined to remove the article, maintaining that since it operated in accordance with the laws of the United States it would only remove libellous material that was the subject of a court decision. Continue reading
Who cares wins?
Last week I heard David Jones, CEO Havas and Founder, One Young World, expounding some of the arguments set out in his acclaimed new book “Who Cares wins”. It expounds that good business is better business – that the biggest winners will be those that operate transparently and authentically. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said of the book “There are many major problems facing the world today. As David Jones argues in Who Cares Wins, business has both a responsibility and an opportunity to be part of the solution and should be a major force for good in helping to solve some of the most pressing problems of our time.” Prime Minister David Cameron said “..in the future the success stories will be those businesses who truly recognise their role in the Big Society – who acknowledge the social as well as the economic value they have the power to create, and who realise the difference we all can make by the decisions that we take”. Continue reading
How the ongoing problem of interest rate “Swaps” is turning economic waves into a storm for many SMEs
In its Autumn Statement earlier this week the Government announced plans to ease credit by underwriting up to £40bn in low-interest loans to small and medium-sized firms. The Government hopes the scheme will make it easier to underwrite bank loans to small firms and says it will cut the average interest rate for those firms by 1%. Alongside this scheme, the Government announced it is launching a £1bn Business Finance Partnership to invest in funds that lend directly to mid-sized companies, in partnership with other investors like pension funds and insurance companies. Both proposals follow numerous largely unsuccessful attempts to get banks to lend to UK businesses.
Burmese National Secures Landmark Opinion Over “Freezing”
Carter-Ruck’s International Law team continues to build on its reputation as one of the leading practices in the field of international asset freezing measures, or “targeted sanctions”. These sanctions involve individuals and corporations having their assets frozen (and their liberty to travel curtailed) by supranational entities such as the European Union. Often the sanctioned person can find themselves in a Kafkaesque position whereby they are suddenly subjected to highly draconian measures yet they are given little or no information about the grounds for their listing or the evidence said to justify such action. Continue reading
The Leveson Inquiry – victims of the media turn the tables on the press
The Leveson Inquiry has been making headline news on an almost daily basis since it began to hear the evidence of a number of victims of the media. While the Inquiry was largely prompted by the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, it is considering evidence on far wider issues of press conduct, of which the testimony of Kate and Gerry McCann has proven a powerful example. Continue reading
