By Ruth McNaught, Solicitor, Harper Macleod LLP

In April, the court lifted an automatic suspension imposed under Regulation 47G of the Public Contracts Regulations 2006 (the “Regulations”), finding that, if the suspension remained in place, the resultant “prejudice” that the contracting authority would suffer would outweigh the potential difficulties in quantifying the aggrieved economic operator’s damages (Metropolitan Resources North West Ltd v Secretary of…

After much fanfare the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has announced detailed plans of the vision for a Green Investment Bank with the aspiration that "The UK will be the first country in the world to create a bank dedicated to the greening of our economy".

Governance and…

Paul Scholes has retired today. There was a great article in the weekend papers about Paul Scholes. The memory I will have of him is wearing number 8 shirt of Iniesta on Saturday evening. There is no better compliment than being asked by Iniesta and Xavi to Paul Scholes at the end of the drubbing on Saturday night for his shirt.

Iniesta is on record as are Zinedine Zidane and Bobby Charlton that Paul Scholes…

Sharon Shoesmith, Former Haringey Council Children's Boss, has won her Court of Appeal Case, against her controversial sacking (live on TV by former Minister Ed…

We have all heard them; we have all passed them on as fact even though most were created in the pub as a result of fear or banter.

An Urban Legend is a story or reputation that appears mysteriously and spreads spontaneously in various forms and is usually false.

In business, Urban Legends can be very dangerous to the strategic future of a firm. 

Urban Legends in business are usually as the result of fear. Fear that a certain firm is too…

Much will be made if United do not overcome Barcelona as expected on Saturday evening.

As United have the biggest following of what are called Anyone But United (ABU) in the world, I suspect that phone ins and the internet will be alive at the end of the match, should as predicted United lose.

A while back I was following discussion on the net about what most fans take out of a football match. For me it has always been the game itself. Ever since playing on a recreational park…

This is not from Legal IT or Legal, but is a shame for the world.

José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva, spokesman TEDxAmazónia, was murdered last Tuesday ... in that day in Brazil was voted to amend the Forest Code...

José Cláudio Ribeiro was a farmer and lived on the extraction of chestnuts and other fruits in the forest. The place where he lived is protected by law and cutting of trees, illegal. Thus, Zé Claudio refused to negotiate with the trees loggers in the…

I read with some surprise an article in the Times 2 supplement (Tuesday the 24th May 2011), from Francis Gibb and Tom Whipple the Legal editor and correspondent respectively, on Keith Schilling the owner/manager of Schillings (law firm). Mr Schillings firm has been involved in the high profile litigation of super injunctions (on behalf of footballers amongst others), which have been flavour of the month for the last few months.

I was particularly surprised at the…

I recently had a conversation with a partner who told me that the firm is not interested in investing in IT and innovation, because everything was already done and thought of in the Legal market.

As you can imagine I was fed up of hearing this conversation and quickly ended it.

What counts is that the market gives me reason!

One of the winners at TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is Docracy, an open source site where users can share and sign legal documents

Docracy is…

With thousands of people already stranded, the ash cloud is set to return to cause even more disruption to holidaymakers. Many questions are being raised as to where employers and employees stand in relation to absences from their workplace due to this 'act of god'.

So, just where do you stand? Our employment team has prepared a useful Legal Update covering some points you need to be aware of.

Withholding pay

Generally speaking, employees are obliged to…

One of the things that I think has changed most in the conveyancing world over the last 40 years is clients’ expectations. In the past everyone expected lawyers to take months to complete sales and purchases. Conveyancers agreed completion dates between themselves, and then told the clients when they were moving! As there was always a four-week period between exchange of contracts and completion, clients had plenty of time to arrange the removal van and sort out getting their pose…

You have decided it’s time to move on to the next challenge in your legal career and are busy job hunting.  Perhaps you are developing your existing law career path.  Perhaps you are targeting specific law firms or have decided to change legal…

Together with Practice Management International, we're planning the 2011 edition of a benchmark study which last year saw 273 firms take part - over half of whom were law firms.

Its the "Client Relationship Management - the truth in professional services" study and last year's study included analysis of the activities firms undertook and the impact on improved strategic and financial performance.  It concentrated on what firms did across the piece in areas such…

I took a day out of the office on Wednesday to attend the Netlaw Media Key Strategy for Law Firms conference.  It was a very good day, focussing on business development issues and ably chaired by Professor Stephen Mayson.

There were a number of presentations, from the head of business development at Mishcon de Reya to IBM’s UK General Counsel.  Other bloggers have covered the whole event in some detail (see Kim Tasso’s blog …

Reputation has become an increasingly significant and increasingly fragile proposition in the age of social media, with brands and individuals being "made" and "broken" in the click of a mouse. It's possible that you're reading a pdf of this article on your iPhone, Blackberry, or other smartphone, which tells the story of the seismic change in the way we communicate and form opinions in the 21st Century – in the mid-90s and the wake of the dot.com bubble bursting, it may have been easy to…

Mark Manley, Media Law Partner at Brabners Chaffe Street comments:



Even if we don’t like to admit it, in the UK we love salacious gossip and scandal. The readership figures for the main red tops well-known for satisfying this hunger speak volumes. Many-a-Brit leaves a newsagents every Sunday…

A new system of Parental leave “blocks” of leave on the horizon from 2015 (subject to “affordability”)

Section 14 of the Coalition agreement boldly declared that: “We will encourage shared parenting from the earliest stages of pregnancy – including the promotion of a system of flexible parental leave”.

Promoting this aim…