Barristers to instruct Solicitor Advocate to sue QC for Libel?

November 3, 2008

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Frances Gibb writes in today’s Times of a furious row between barristers and solicitors. The former say that their underlings, foolishly given rights of audience in the higher courts a few years ago, are unfit for the task of criminal advocacy. As Peter Lodder QC, chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, says: “There is a huge increase in the use of higher-court advocates [solicitors who are qualified to act as defence advocates in serious trials]. The Bar does not say that such an advocate is bad by definition. Some are good, but there are many who are truly appalling – defence solicitors who have never before conducted a crown court trial and have very limited experience in the magistrates’ trials now appear as junior advocates to defend in murder trials.”

In the face of such damning criticism The Law Society chooses to defend its members by calling upon Mr Lodder to provide specific examples of ineptitude. In the absence of such, says Desmond Hudson, the chief executive of the Law Society, “these accusations are entirely unsubstantiated.”

The trouble is that Mr Lodder can’t really go round pointing the finger at specific individuals because he’ll find himself sued for libel. Indeed, an astute libel lawyer might conclude that the class of people referred to by Mr Lodder in the following quote is sufficiently confined to enable those within it to claim that they are identified and identifiable. Of Crown Prosecution Service barristers, some of whom had left the bar because they had apparently “never risen above a modest practice”, Mr Lodder told the Times: “Now they have become the leading advocate in murder prosecutions, cases in which they would never have been instructed by the CPS while they remained in private practice. All this is done in the interests of economy, without any regard for the interests of justice. Watching the destruction of the system by the use of apparently cheap and inadequate labour is deeply upsetting and demoralising to the professional Bar.”

That seems highly defamatory of a certain class of person, but will any of them decide to sue Mr Lodder? If so, they might like to avail themsevles of the services of David Price, one of the UK’s best-known libel lawyers – and a highly regarded solicitor advocate.

 

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
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The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.