Legal Commentary by James Perry

.....this would be my script.... “Magenta and cyan. Do you remember those colours? I do. Two bright and exotic colours of my early childhood. Colours from the early 1980’s when we would all sit there as kids, type in a page of coding taken from our computer manuals (those manuals that were only printed in black and white because colour print was expensive!), wait patiently while the cassette whirred, bleeped and buzzed and hope (we would actually cross our fingers sometimes); hope these bright colours would appear on screen as patterns or shapes. Of course along the way we hoped we didn’t get an error - something some of you may remember was called a syntax error. “Syntax error, string too long” was the typical error I got back from the bulky grey box many times. I can at this point see half a sea of blank faces out there when I’m mentioning these things. “A piece of string?”, “what’s a cassette?” some are thinking. Or for those slightly older “why is he talking about cassettes an...

Working life as a debt recovery Solicitor is a rich tapestry of clients whose business threads are every imaginable colour, debtors every imaginable material and chances of success (based on numerous other variables) every imaginable shape and size. That variety I get to enjoy every day is the reason why I do what I do. How then, I ask myself, as I read the SRA guidance (you can read by clicking the link here -  https://www.sra.org.uk/solicitors/guidance/ethics-guidance/price-transparency.page  ), am I going to maintain client choice (and act in my client’s best interests) to accommodate all sectors and all debt types when I am forced by the SRA to publish my pricing online in December?  My clients are not numbers to me. They are each unique and I want to be able to treat them as such so I can properly look after them by pricing accordingly. Some of you might say well of course he doesn’t want to publish his figures but there is far more to this than that. How exactl...

In October this year businesses who deal with consumers are bracing themselves for the additional noise their printers and post-rooms will be making moving forward as they start to print huge volumes of additional documents and spend lots more on their postage costs when chasing their debts. ISO environmental certifications will be put at risk as their post staff spend half their lives shuffling additional reams of paper and their office staff half their lives dealing with all the additional queries they will be faced with trying to ensure they meet the new regulatory requirements of the Pre-action protocol for debt claims. The above might seem like a mild over exaggeration but the reality is that these changes will cost businesses more in time and resources. For that reason, I find this a very strange amendment to the court rules; not least because it takes a simplistic process which was working really well in almost all cases ("Simple i...

Lord Justice Jackson has now issued his final report in respect of fixed-fees, which in general is fairly (I'm trying to be positive!) good news for legal practitioners and their clients. The proposed reforms do not cut as deep as we all initially thought so for now most of us are probably breathing a quiet sigh of relief. Clients should as well, unless you are a serial defendant - in which case you might be a bit disappointed that the fixed-fee proposals didn't go further! However, not all areas of business and the profession were winners when the report was published last week. Unfortunately it doesn't look like particularly good news for businesses instructing Solicitors to collect their debts or indeed Solicitors who represent clients in "defended debt cases" who will now (if the proposals are introduced) face tricky conversations with their clients when trying to explain that it is likely that success will not yield the net recovery ...