Understand Your Rights. Solve Your Legal Problems
The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body - it decided in 1973 to enter the European Economic Community and in 1992, to sign the Maastricht Treaty, thus creating the EU.
Entering into the European structures caused implications for the next 43 years of the UK’s rule of law, economics, structure of society and culture, as the legal, economic and comprehensive taking into account culture, views, habits etc. migration/ immigration began.
Immigration/ Brexit & single market access
Indeed, the invaluable influence has always had an access to a single market.
The common market, the Treaty of Rome’s main objective, was achieved through the 1968 customs union, the abolition of quotas, the free movement of citizens and workers, and a degree of tax harmonisation with the general introduction of VAT in 1970. However, the freedom of trade in goods and services and the freedom of establishment were still limited due to continuing anti-competitive practices imposed by public authorities.
The lack of progress in the achievement of the common market was largely attributed to the choice of an overly detailed method of legislative harmonization and to the rule that required unanimity for decisions to be taken in the Council. According to the Cecchini report (‘The cost of non-Europe’), presented in March 1988, this was extremely expensive for the economy, costing between 4.25% and 6.5% of GDP. In the mid-1980s political debate on this issue led the EEC to consider a more thorough approach to the objective of removing trade barriers: the internal market.
The Single European Act entered into force on 1st July 1987, setting a precise deadline of 31st December 1992 for completion of the internal market. It also strengthened the decision-making mechanisms for the internal market by introducing qualified majority voting for common customs tariffs, free provision of services, free movement of capital, and approximation of national legislation. By the time the deadline passed, over 90% of the legislative acts listed in the 1985 White Paper had been adopted, largely under the qualified majority rule.
The single market refers to the EU as one territory without any internal borders or other regulatory obstacles to the free movement of goods and services. A functioning single market stimulates competition and trade, improves efficiency, and raises quality.
The EU single market for goods accounts for about 500 million consumers and 21 million small and medium- sized enterprises. The EU single market for services accounts for over 70% of all economics activity in EU and similar proportion of its employment.
In conclusion, a fully functional digital single market is a crucial feature for the European business, including the British one. One must bear in mind that the EU single market promotes innovation; contributing 415 billion Euros to the EU economy each year.
The European Commission works on removing the last barriers in internal trading and preventing the creation of new ones. It applies Treaty rules prohibiting quantitative restrictions on imports and exports (vide article 34 to 36 TFEU) and manages the notification procedures on technical regulations (2015/1535).
The European Commission monitors the application of EU law and can launch infringement proceedings against EU countries that do not comply. It also monitors the functioning of the single market, producing evaluations and key economics reports. In cooperation with the local partners namely EU countries, the European Commission is organizing a series of various workshops all over the EU member nations to develop better understanding of the collaborative and shared economy, to identify the most innovative business models, to uncover real risks and regulatory barriers, and to debate the most appropriate form of regulations.
In the case of Brexit, and taking into account the prospective intentions to limit the free movement between the UK and the EU, the option that excludes the single market access is highly probable, but is that a price that should be paid by British businesses?
On the other hand, in the case of aiming towards single market access one must bear in mind the question: who should provide goods and services? There is no unlimited movement of services and goods if there is not enough of the human factor to provide them.
The wider the access to the single market, the more business (namely trade, goods, whole range of services) develops and the more places of work are being created. Therefore a lack of access to the single market would cause an increase in unemployment as a lot of international companies have their branches in the UK and will not be able to provide their services and goods freely, thus the employees will not be needed anymore.
In addition one must bear in mind that the price of opting towards exclusion from the single market (due to the immigration factor permanently raised during the leave campaign) is much higher than the threat of increase in unemployment, and duty customs which will influence the prices for everyone living in the UK, especially in the cases of having a holiday abroad, buying a property abroad, or buying anything abroad via eBay for instance. So the question is whether the British society and British politicians are to pay the price of issuing Brexit without access to the single market as it is obvious that the British economy, particularly London, will not.
Benefits/ Brexit/ Immigration
One of the essential factors promoted by the ‘leave’ campaign was the frustrating issue of benefits for migrants.
David Cameron announced victory and pledged to campaign with “all my heart and soul” to keep Britain inside the EU after the Decision of the heads of state or government, meeting within the European Council, concerning a new settlement for the UK within the EU was struck on 19th February 2016 to redraw the terms of the UK’s membership.
The Decision clearly states that: "It is recognised that the United Kingdom, in the light of the specific situation it has under the Treaties, is not committed to further political integration into the European Union. The substance of this will be incorporated into the Treaties at the time of their next revision in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Treaties and the respective constitutional requirements of the Member States, so as to make it clear that the references to ever closer union do not apply to the United Kingdom."
Leaders of the 27 member nations agreed to:
In conclusion, David Cameron was granted almost all of his demands, therefore if anybody voted to leave because of benefits for migrants, it was a result of the lack of proper information in relation to the decision made on 19th February 2016.
Brexit/ immigration/ Dublin Regulation
In the wider perspective of the immigration issue, Brexit influences the United Kingdom's situation also in relation to immigration beyond EU borders, namely refugees and asylum seekers.
The Dublin Regulation - establishes which of the Member States is responsible for the examination of the asylum application. The main approach of an updated Dublin Regulation is that the country where the asylum seeker arrives has to process the application and is responsible for them. In case of Brexit, the United Kingdom will not be covered with this Regulation anymore, thus dealing and searching for a solution to such a difficult situation connected with the refugees looking for a shelter to protect their lives will be the sole initiative of the UK.
I have been a Practitioner and Solicitor of England and Wales for 33 years. More than 28 years of my Practice has been absorbed by the Immigration, Nationality and Human Rights Practice. The Practice involves applications, representations to the Home Office and conducting cases from the First Tier Tribunal to the House of Lords (in the past) and now Supreme Courts. I enjoy my area of practice in this field because it delivers liberty, life, a future and prosperity to my successful clients.
Settlement in UK
Since 2012, I have been experiencing an agony of inhuman, unjust and unfair laws and dispensing justice. Prior to 2012, Immigrants on various walks of lives were able to achieve UK residency, which is fondly referred by the Immigrants as ‘Permanent Residence’ and legal term as ‘Indefinite Leave to remain’. The changes since 2012 up to now have brought grief to many families of Immigrants who are already settled in the UK.
Family members who are settled in the UK fall within the dream category of the Government who are called ‘hard working people’, but they cannot bring their parents to live with them. The change of rules only allows entry clearance if the parents cannot take care of themselves. Even without being recourse to public funds, parents over 65 cannot enjoy their retirement in settlement with their children in the UK. The rights to appeal on family visits have also been withdrawn. Refusals on technical grounds are on large scales.
Immigrants who are well settled with jobs in the UK and who have adequate income cannot bring their spouses who remain abroad, and also cannot join the spouse in UK unless he or she has higher level of fluency to pass the English Language Test. This test should have been at least applied to the marriages after the implementation of this rule, instead it is applied to the very old marriages and spouses too.
‘Access to Justice’ has become a household name in Legal and Judicial circles. This is simply because of the cuts in Legal Aid funding. In Immigration and Human Rights Law access to justice has been deprived on two fronts; firstly, with the Legal Aid cuts, and in addition to that, withdrawal of rights to appeal in many categories of applications to the Home Office. In the event of a decision which does not attract a right of appeal, the only choice is to seek redress to the Administrative Court (High Court) or Upper Tribunal by way of Judicial Review application. Such application would only be on Point of Law or Error in Law and is enormously expensive for an ordinary man.
Asylum Law
Asylum Law in my view has positively developed in the past 30 years. Earlier it was relied on UN Convention for Refugees 1951. Thereafter, the Human Rights Act 1998 had been installed within the UK Laws. During the landmark case of ‘Sivakumaran and Others’, in which I was also involved, the House of Lords gave guidelines that the expected ‘Standard of Proof’ is not beyond reasonable doubt and not based on a balance of probabilities, but a lower threshold ‘Standard of Proof’ by ‘reasonable degree of likelihood’. This definition made the Asylum Law Practitioners and their Asylums Seekers lives slightly easier.
New weapon to prevent access to Justice
In Nationality applications there is no right of appeal but the application fees have been increased on regular basis. For a single person to apply for Nationality after living in this country for many years and paying taxes, the fee is £1236. The cost for an ideal hardworking family with two children would be £4344. The other scenario is in limited appeal rights; the court fees for the appeals have been drastically increased many fold. This is not to cover the cost of the administration and judicial process, but to deter people from appealing and exercising their right of appeal to have access to justice. The latest increase to appeal to the First Tier Tribunal against an Immigration decision was £140 per person in the family. From the 10th October the fees increased from £140 to £800.
There has been no agitation or lobbying against these unfair administrative rules. There are no consumer lobbies or Immigrant lobbies or even the opposition from MPs or Community Groups. Is it because it only affects the Immigrants?
General view on Service to Clients
With all the difficulties, hurdles and injustice, I still enjoy the practice of Immigration and Human Rights Law. The mantra I preach to the clients is to come clean and tell the truth to your lawyer, who will find the appropriate solution and the best outcome. I tell them: “The system in this country is good. Therefore do not fight the system but fight within the system.”
Continuing on with our very special Raising the Bar interviews, Mark Symes talks to Lawyer Monthly about his work in immigration & asylum, with particular expertise on the implications of Brexit on EU and UK business immigration law. Mark also tells us about his most notable cases and notes his opinion in regards to ‘raising the bar’ on immigration law, following the UK’s exit from the EU.
Mark Symes specialises in all aspects of immigration law; he has appeared in many leading cases involving asylum, human rights and public law. A Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal and a fellow of the Refugee Law Initiative at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Mark is co-author of Asylum Law and Practice - “encyclopaedic... pre-eminent” according to one Supreme Court judge, and co-author of Immigration Appeals and Remedies Handbook - (“invaluable … to the armoury of all … a compulsory addition to the library of every immigration judge and practitioner”: President of the Upper Tribunal Mr Justice McCloskey). Mark is also a contributor to MacDonalds Immigration Law and Practice.
How did you come to specialise in immigration, asylum and human rights law?
I became interested in refugee law and worked at the Refugee Legal Centre in the early 1990s, in a very different funding climate to the current one. Over the following decade the NGO sector grew very significantly and there was the possibility of pursuing a legal career within specialist NGOs such as RLC. Eventually I took charge of national legal strategy and training.
What has been one of the most notable and impacting cases you have worked on, and how did you raise the bar in this scenario?
In SQ (Pakistan) [2013] EWCA Civ 1251 I represented a young boy who potentially faced imminent death on a return to his country of origin. His case had failed in the Tribunals but the Court accepted that it raised issues of special public importance such as to surmount the “second appeals” test, notwithstanding that it had been twice refused permission to appeal to the Upper Tribunal. We persuaded the Court of Appeal that the private life of vulnerable children with serious health problems required special attention, representing an exception to the general rule for migrants that only the prospect of imminent death without palliative care could prevent their return abroad.
Over the last decade, what would you say have been the most significant milestones in UK immigration law to affect your work?
Two things:
Do you have any thoughts on the potential legal reforms in immigration and asylum that may be incited as a result of the recent Brexit vote?
By potentially making millions of EEA nationals (often with British citizen family members and children) who have lived and worked freely in the UK for many years subject to immigration control, the government is vastly expanding the work that will have to be done in future by the immigration dept. of the Home Office (UKVI). It remains unclear what arrangements will be put in place for the very large numbers of EEA nationals who are entitled to permanent residence, but have not previously been required to obtain documentation to confirm this.
British workers and entrepreneurs wishing to establish themselves in an EU Member State in future face the likelihood of quotas or rules, by which EU Member States give preference to EU nationals.
One might hope for some kind of transitional measures whereby those who have made their lives in this country, and contributed to the economy, can continue to reside here without satisfying the strictures of the Rules currently applying to non-EEA citizens.
How might this potentially affect the way business immigration is dealt with?
There are very large numbers of EU nationals presently in the UK in circumstances which would normally be subject to the business immigration routes. Currently, they are free to generate income for themselves and wealth for the UK via tax revenues and the general contribution to the economy without any significant regulatory burden. For example, wealthy individuals may be present as self-sufficient EEA nationals, whereas were they third country nationals they would have to satisfy the highly technical requirements of the Investor route; they may have set up a business, but if subject to immigration control they would have to satisfy the dozens of technical Rules found in the Entrepreneur route. There are large numbers of EEA nationals working here who would need their present employers to become sponsors under the ‘Tier 2’ route (and those sponsors would have to face the expense, including the ‘immigration skills charge’ of £1,000 per migrant, per year entering force in April 2017, and the administrative burden set out in the hundreds of pages of government-imposed guidance).
In regards to the UK’s approach to granting asylum, what do you believe should be expected of any government and if you had the power, what would you change or introduce?
The present crisis arising from armed conflict in the Middle East has led to vast population movements on a scale seldom seen since the Second World War. All civilised nations should see the virtue of responding to a humanitarian crisis so that the burden is shared equally. It is especially unfortunate that vulnerable children in places such as Calais are unable to be reunited with family members in the UK and elsewhere because of foot-dragging and reliance on legal technicalities by government bureaucrats.
Finally, how would you explain your reputation as a barrister who has raised the bar when it comes to UK immigration law?
Internal to the brief, when advising immigration clients, it is imperative to master their immigration history and spot missing information that might bear vitally on the case early on. Externally once must be aware of the constantly changing environment of rules and regulations and the possible legal challenge to any adverse decision. It is likely that the UK’s proposed departure from the EU will change the focus of restraint on governmental power from European Union law to domestic public law principles, including the judge-made rights recognised in our unwritten constitution: that is the likely direction of travel for lawyers at the cutting edge.
As Lawyer Monthly’s first Raising the Bar appearance, Mark Dempsey SC introduces the building & construction sphere in Australia, highlighting the challenges he has encountered throughout his legal career, some of the precedents set and seen in the field, and the standards that have changed in this field over the years.
Mark is a highly experienced commercial advocate with a wide-ranging commercial practice. He appears at trial and appellate levels in State and Federal Courts, and in Mediation and Arbitration throughout Australia.
He has developed a special expertise in construction and engineering disputes, in particular, in complex and challenging cases.
He has been recognised as a leader in the field of construction law and litigation in Best Lawyers in Australia (2017 edition), Chambers Asia Pacific (2016) and Doyle’s List (2016).
Mark provides first class service with acuity, efficiency and flexibility. He has a deep knowledge of the law and vast experience in the conduct of commercial disputes from over 30 years of legal practice, 12 as Senior Counsel.
Mark also practices as an Arbitrator (he is a Fellow of the CIArb) and Mediator. In each capacity, he deploys the high end skill sets derived from his years of practice, throughout Australia and the Asia Pacific region. Mark enjoys working closely with his instructing solicitors and clients to achieve the optimal outcome in a cost effective manner.
Seven Wentworth & Selborne Chambers is a leading Australian commercial floor of barristers based in Sydney with a leading group of practitioners specialising in Building & Construction law and dispute resolution recognised in such publications as Best Lawyers in Australia, Doyle’s List, Chambers Asia Pacific.
That group includes Mark Dempsey SC, Duncan Miller SC, Nick Kidd SC, Nuala Simpson, Justin Hogan Doran, Duncan McFarlane, Brett Le Plastrier, David Hughes, Robert Carey and Mark Sheldon.
How did you come to specialise in the legal segment of building & construction and what is it about this industry that appeals most to you?
By chance; about 25 years ago, within five minutes, I received offers of two briefs. I accepted the first (in accordance with the Bar rules) and found myself engaged in my first long-running construction arbitration as junior to a leading senior counsel instructed by Allens. One thing led to another, and from then on I have being engaged in many significant and wrong long-running disputes in court and arbitration throughout Australia.
What have been the most challenging construction and engineering disputes you have had the pleasure of heading up, and what were the complexities involved?
There is a range. From the perspective of legal complexity and difficulty, the Abigroup v Sydney Catchment Authority litigation involved a lengthy reference hearing followed by three adoption hearings in the Technology & Construction List of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, and involved two appeals to the New South Wales Court of Appeal; the final of those decisions establishing significant new law as to the measure of damages recoverable in an action for misleading or deceptive conduct.
From the perspective of commercial significance and intensity, one matter which comes readily to mind was the litigation over the design and construction of the Hilton Hotel redevelopment project in Sydney.
From the perspective of technical complexity, an action by the owner of a coal-fired power plant against an EPC contractor for defective design or construction of the internal refractory lining of the furnace was the most challenging including very complicated questions of metallurgy, combustion and materials science, and systems analysis.
From the perspective of trial advocacy and forensic challenges, a keenly contested arbitration concerning the construction of three large leachate tanks constructed for a large uranium and gold mining facility posed particular challenges in cross examination of the large number of witnesses of 30 days in the conduct of cross-examination of experts giving concurrent evidence in five disciplines over seven consecutive days.
In your more than 30 years’ experience in this field, what would you say has been the biggest precedent you have set in the practice of building &construction law?
The case in which I was involved which has set the most significant precedent is ‘Abigroup Contractors Pty Ltd v Sydney Catchment Authority (No 3) [2006] NSWCA 282; (2006) 67 NSWLR 341’.
How would you justify yourself as a barrister that increasingly raises the bar when it comes to Australian building & construction law?
Dispute resolution of large and high-value construction disputes is constantly challenging.
The great challenge and great satisfaction of practice in this area is to be continually under pressure to identify and achieve improvements in all of these aspects
To what extent do you believe there is still capacity to raise this bar further, and develop the benchmark for legal services in this field in Australia?
There is always room for improvement in all of the six aspects referred to above.
What do you find most exciting and rewarding about your role as an Australian barrister in this legal segment, and what is it that keeps you one step ahead of your colleagues?
It is a privilege to be chosen to represent the interests of parties in litigation, and to bring to bear the combined experience of over 30 years’ experience of working with and learning from first-class professionals and judges.
It is a pleasure to have the opportunity of meeting and working with highly skilled and intelligent clients, experts, solicitors and fellow barristers, and to appear before the many outstanding judges and arbitrators engaged in this field in Australia and throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
It is great pleasure to be able to work with my colleagues on the combined 7 Wentworth & Selborne Chambers, many of whom are recognised leaders in the field of Building and Construction law and dispute resolution.
Technology is an ever moving target. It’s one of the most demanding working environments; every few weeks or months you need to understand and account for new technologies changing the nature of IT.
However, the benefits of being in a fast-paced environment are that new opportunities to combine methods or technology occur almost daily. One such combination is Narrow Artificial Intelligence (ML) for contract detection and analytics, brought together with the ‘underlying idea’ of smart contracts, or the encoding and execution of contractual data and events on a programmable blockchain.
Smart contracts may not fully deliver on all that is promised. Smart contracts face several technical limitations and challenges. The usefulness of the data or functions encoded, and how it gets accurately encoded onto the smart contract are often questioned.
What this does not mean is that the underlying idea behind smart contracts should be dismissed. There are multiple approaches to the creation of smart contracts to overcome the challenges, including combining Narrow Artificial Intelligence for the detection and extraction of information held within physical contracts, and once extracted, encoding this data onto a blockchain.
Intelligent Contracts
This approach is far more intelligent and extensible than smart contracts as they are currently defined, and as such, are called Intelligent Contracts. The intelligence comes from the ‘I’ in AI, where a system is taught to continually and consistently recognise and extract key information from contracts, with active learning based on users’ responses, both positive and negative, to the extractions and predictions made. This is very different to current smart contracts, but it still uses some of the underlying methods of blockchain and the extension to store immutable information or actionable events within a block.
The Value of Intelligent Contracts
To help demonstrate the value of intelligent contracts, let’s take a sample customer, a large international IT / Software company that has acquired different companies or business units over many years. They have over 16 different contracting solutions on both the buy and sell sides of their business, with no standard reporting on contracts. They continually sign Master Agreements in different locations or departments, and should allow all global entities access to discounts once negotiated levels are reached or exceeded. This is a very common challenge with larger organisations.
You can immediately see where a ‘smart contract’ could be used to encode the master agreement’s key performance indicators (KPIs) onto a blockchain, and then automatically apply the discounts across all departments. However, with all the different systems, and no single or consistent method to track and report on new contracts being created, signed, or agreed to on (potentially) 3rd party paper, extracting the required information can be a challenge
Blockchain: The Single Source of the Truth
If we take this further, past just the encoding of actions, and the combination of parties and events, we can see how this solution provides companies with a ‘single source of the truth’ within contracts. As a contract placed onto the blockchain has been agreed by both parties, why not share the same information between parties – as a single entity with continually updated contract terms?
Companies placing details of actual contracts onto a public blockchain might soon run into issues of security and scalability. Security because every person on the blockchain can see the transactions that occurred, and scalability as block size is limited on public blockchains for many reasons, not least of which is performance. With blockchain, the larger the blocks the longer it takes, and the more processing power is needed to reach consensus (e.g. the process used by a group of peers responsible for maintaining a distributed ledger to reach agreement on the ledger’s contents.) To this end, it should be clear that a public blockchain or smart contracts system are unlikely to meet the requirements of many organisations for contracts.
Intelligent contracts use private blockchains with algorithms to ensure no single system controls the creation of the blocks, leading to immutable and distributed consensus. As the chains are private, the issue with sizes of blocks is removed, and security can be implemented at many different layers, including HASH-only and PKI key-level security for access to information encoded on the blockchain. The use of the private blockchain also allows for the system to provide Know Your Customer (KYC) functions, as each entity within the system would be required to be known as they are a party to, or have an interest in a contract. They can all participate in the creation of the blocks as each entity is known and trusted.
With the differences outlined above, it’s clear to see why intelligent contracts are what enterprise customers need.
Intelligent Contracts: The User Experience
One of the most important aspects of technology is to make users’ daily lives simpler, and the operation and adoption of new technology as seamless as possible. One of the best ways I have found to do this, over years of working with enterprise customers, is to embed new functions into well-known existing applications or processes so users are actually unaware of the new processes and functions taking place behind the scenes.
Who Needs Intelligent Contracts?
In the example above, I described a large Software/IT company with many different contract repositories and processes across their business functions and lines of businesses.
But there are many other types of user cases for intelligent contracts, where the capabilities of this new technology will provide significant value over what is currently available. These include M&A and business restructuring, contract Lifecycle management (CLM), and regulatory compliance.
Intelligent Contracts in M&A
When ownership of an organisation changes, the contracts associated with that business are divested or acquired within those transactions, and can greatly affect the accretive nature or overall outcome of the transaction. In M&A, organisations need to review contracts and analyse their metadata in the due diligence phase, to ensure they know what they are buying, and then integrate contracts into the new organisation post transaction. With divestitures, they need to know which entities to assign the appropriate contracts.
With intelligent contracts, organisations will be able to immediately locate all relevant contracts as they will be located in one repository. All the metadata will be associated as blocks on the relevant chains, and so full reviews will be fast and simple, in due diligence and post transaction. For example, special indemnifications and assignment and termination rules will be identified immediately across the entire portfolio, and will be relevant to valuation. The current deal room, where limited subsets of contract documents are placed for manual reviews across multiple legal professionals will no longer be needed. The deep analytics embedded in Intelligent contracts will mean that M&A and legal pros can immediately, and visually, capture all types of metrics and analytics across entire contract portfolios.
Contract Lifecycle Management
A challenge often found with contract lifecycle management is system ROI which has been illusive for most customers. The systems are heavy in workflow and document library services, and are very light in contract data management. They have proven to be overly complex, tough to implement, and suffer from low adoption rates and usage with knowledge workers. They also have poor change management functionality, and the data management is primarily manual input of contract data by users, which is inconsistent and error prone.
Intelligent contracts will be authored in the familiar Word user interface, and collaboration and negotiation is facilitated via workflow in the blockchain. Contract data is captured and shared automatically on the chain, and there is never any question or confusion as to which versions and edits are being used and approved, and why. Changes can be initiated and processed in the LOBs via Word using approved language, meaning Legal Ops resources are used more efficiently and cost effectively. The result is a lean, efficient, secure, and scalable contracting system that finally delivers the ROI desired for contract automation.
Regulatory Compliance
The final user case is in regulatory compliance. With intelligent contracts, when a regulation changes, all contract data is automatically captured and presented visually, so organisations understand the size and nature of the impact of the new regulation to their business. Compliance owners can determine strategies and project plans to meet compliance deadlines.
When contract repapering or renegotiation is needed to achieve compliance, the business owner can initiate the process in MS Word and using approved language, make the needed changes. Those changes are captured on the blockchain, and then can be routed to legal ops for final approval. This is more efficient than using legal ops resources throughout the entire process. The blockchain is available to all relevant parties, so contract changes are permanent, transparent, and auditable.
Toby Hannon, Vice President of Seal Software, EMEA
(Source: Seal Software)
Leading software provider, Advanced, is experiencing increasing demand for the latest version of its award-winning solution, Laserform Hub, which includes the addition of combined SDLT and Land Registry submissions.
Laserform Hub was developed to enable law firms to meet the Government’s ‘digital by default’ strategy by allowing secure electronic form submission to multiple government portals from a single location.
One hundred law firms, ranging from solo practitioners to Top 200 firms, have now signed up to the Hub, with over half of those already fully operational. Advanced launched the new combined gateway in April after working closely with the Land Registry for several months.
The new gateway simplifies the process for law firms that complete commercial and residential filing, providing them with a simple online process for submitting SDLT and AP1 forms. Features include automatic pre-population of forms and support for supervision to monitor teams and ensure deadlines are not missed.
James Rippin, Business Gateway Product Manager at Land Registry, comments, “We’ve had a very positive relationship with Advanced for a number of years now and they really understand the needs of the legal market.
“As well as simplifying the submission process and reducing risk for law firms, the new gateway will benefit Land Registry by increasing the number of digital applications we receive. We want customers to interact with us digitally because it’s more efficient, and the built-in checks in Laserform Hub result in greater accuracy and time savings.”
The new gateway was developed in an agile way, starting with a basic application which was then built out and tailored based on feedback from early adopters. As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, there are no installation costs or overheads for customers, who have 24/7 access to the system.
Graham Sweeney, Operations Director at Schofield Sweeney, a law firm using Laserform Hub says, “Innovation is important for our practice; being involved early in the development of Laserform Hub has given us the opportunity to feed into the finished application.
“We have been using the solution for Companies House mortgage filing, and recently adding SDLT and Land Registry submissions to the platform means we can submit all of these forms from one application. The cloud-based application is quick, easy to use and more cost effective.”
To find out more about Advanced’s Laserform Hub, visit www.laserformhub.legal.
(Source: Advance)
Business women who want to get ahead in male dominated industries such as the financial and private equity sectors need to improve their self-confidence and negotiating skills, Georgina Squire, head of dispute resolution at Rosling King LLP says.
Speaking at the BVCA Summit in London, Squire discussed the challenges facing women in business with Claudine Collins, the UK managing director of advertising agency MediaCom.
Collins, one of Lord Sugar’s most trusted confidantes and winner of Media's Most Inspiring Women in the industry, has been an advocate for diversity in the workplace for many years.
One of the highlights of the discussion included a point taken from The Glass Wall book by Sue Unerman and Kathryn Jacob. A glass wall, as opposed to a glass ceiling, represents an obstacle for women who are left out of office conversations, which are taken to the pub or the golf course by their male peers.
This boys’ club culture can exclude women from career enhancing opportunities, but can be overcome if women are proactive. By consciously requesting time with their superiors for lunch or a drink, business women can create a situation where more informal conversation can be had and where they can showcase their achievements at work.
Another issue that women need to tackle is a tendency, out of modesty, to talk themselves out of a job. Said Collins: “Very often, women will not apply for jobs unless they believe they are 100% qualified to do it, whilst men often don’t think that way.”
Similarly, women are much more reticent about putting themselves forward for promotion or asking for a salary increase. Collins continued: “We women need to stop focussing on our weaknesses and spend our energies on improving them. We need to start focussing at what we are brilliant at and we need to sell our qualities.”
Attracting the best female talent has long been a challenge for companies aiming to balance the gender gap. A report from the Government Equalities Office states that bringing the balance of women’s productivity and employment to the same level as men could add £600 billion to the UK economy, whilst equalising participation rates could add 10% to the UK economy by 2030.
Despite the fact that the number of women in leadership roles in FTSE 100 firms has more than doubled over the last five years, according to FN's Sixth Annual Women in Finance Survey, there are still only 26% of women at board level, so there is still a notable gender imbalance in the financial services sector.
Private equity is one of those areas where this imbalance is most apparent with 40% of companies having no female executive committee members at all.
Georgina Squire concluded: “Women represent 50% of the human race and it is fundamental that their input in the financial sectors, particularly in private equity, is not lost. In a world where we have a female UK prime minister, and a female US presidential candidate, it is great to see that barriers are starting to be broken down and the contribution that women can make is being recognised in male dominated sectors, including Private Equity.”
(Source: Rosling King LLP)
When workers are injured on the job, they are entitled to submit a compensation claim that covers the costs of their medical treatment. However, as many lawyers know too well, sometimes the nature of injuries or the behavior of employers warrants additional action beyond the fulfillment of the compensation claim.
Though compensation is mandated by federal and state law, disagreements over workplace injuries can take months or years to resolve. Unfortunately, the more time a case takes to reach a conclusion, the more money is lost in the shuffle.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, businesses in the United States lose an estimated $250 billion every year to on-the-job injuries, and for most employers, the cost of such suits is enough to put them well in the red. Some states are instituting new efforts to invigorate businesses burdened by high numbers of workplace injuries ― but the best way businesses can avoid closing shop due to workplace injuries is to act quickly and efficiently as soon as an accident occurs.
The amount lost by U.S. businesses ― $250 billion ― may seem extravagant, but that great sum isn’t handed out to every worker who sustains an injury at work. That figure is divided amongst millions of American workers.
In fact, there are more than 8.5 million workplace injuries sustained every year in the United States, which amounts to more than 23,000 per day; worse, work-related fatalities add up to more than 52,000, meaning more than 142 people die every day thanks to their work.
Workers’ compensation is responsible for a sizeable chunk of the $250 billion lost to injuries. Workers who accept workplace injury compensation ― which usually include wage replacement as well as medical benefits ― are typically forbidden from filing a lawsuit against their employers. Comp insurance isn’t cheap, but most employers opt in because the compensation bargain prevents them from becoming insolvent due to high damage rewards.
However, lawsuits do happen, and they tend to be distressingly expensive for employers. Lawsuits, which are typically filed as personal injury claims, are entitled to seek recovery of all damages sustained, to include lost earnings, lost earning capacity, medical bills past and future, and permanent impairment.
Additionally, workers who accept workers’ comp are not entitled to benefits for pain and suffering or loss of enjoyment of life, but lawsuits that settle in workers’ favor usually include remunerations for such damages, which are difficult to quantify and typically cost exorbitant amounts in settlements or trial cases.
Finally, businesses suffer due to a loss in productivity after workplace accidents. Recovering workers cannot perform at the same capacity as before their injuries; in fact, most are absent for a number of workdays, and the diminished workforce can be more impairing to businesses than the injured worker’s costs of compensation.
According to a study at Cornell University, the loss of productivity from one absent employee amounted to at least 1.3 times his or her wages, and that number compounds for every day the worker cannot return. With lessened teams as well as potential personal injury lawsuits, employers with injured workers have plenty of costs to worry about.
Fortunately, businesses are more than capable of reducing their risk of employee injury and therefore avoiding much of these exorbitant costs altogether. The first step is always employee education: With regular safety training ― and appropriate licensing or certification as necessary ― employees should recognize potentially dangerous situations and act accordingly.
However, accidents do happen, and businesses should prepare employees with the proper procedures to avoid unnecessary damage and costly lawsuits. For example, employees must know to immediately report any injuries to supervisors, ideally in writing. They should be encouraged to seek medical attention, ideally from a doctor affiliated with the employer’s insurance carrier.
Those businesses that care little for their employees’ welfare will certainly pay for their malfeasance. Injured and wronged workers should certainly seek local, experienced legal counsel. An injury lawyer in San Antonio will work tirelessly to protect the rights of fellow San Antonians to keep the city healthy and productive, and the same can be said of most injury lawyers in all cities.
Because of the outrageous costs of workplace injuries, a number of governments are working to help businesses survive compensation and lawsuits while protecting employee welfare.
One solution comes from Argentina, where businesses spend almost 20 percent of their earnings on insurance. If passed, the Argentine bill will prevent lawyers and investigators from pocketing employees’ compensation benefits, reducing the outgoing expenses of businesses.
Alternatively, New York aims to offer regional businesses $5 million in grants to help them create working conditions that facilitate safety and reduce likelihood of injury. Only time will tell whether state interference will help businesses or workers in the case of workplace injury.
Recently the UK’s new Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham who took over in July 2016, published the £400,000 Monetary Penalty Notice issued to TalkTalk on 30 September 2016. This Notice detailed her reasons for imposing the highest ever UK fine for a serious breach of the Data Protection Act 1998. Denham was pretty scathing – “Yes hacking is wrong, but that is not an excuse for companies to abdicate their security obligations. TalkTalk should and could have done more to safeguard its customer information. It did not and we have taken action.”
Paul Motion, partner and head of the Data Protection Defence Team at leading independent Scottish law firm BTO Solicitors, commented: “The fine of course relates to TalkTalk’s much publicised data hack on 21 October 2015. TalkTalk has said it found the fine disappointing as it had co-operated fully with the ICO investigation. But the telecoms giant shouldn’t really have been surprised. TalkTalk bought Tiscali in 2009. It appears TalkTalk did not know Tiscali’s infrastructure included old web pages that were still available on line, which gave access to a database containing the names of 156,959 customers and bank details for 15,656 people. TalkTalk also did not know the database software was out of date and had not been patched regularly to address vulnerabilities. The same SQL attack that was carried out successfully on 21st October 2015 had also taken place on the same webpages in July and September 2015. The £400k fine was mainly for a serious breach of the seventh Data Protection Principle – failing to have appropriate technical and organisational measures in place to secure data – but also for a breach of the fifth Principle, which outlaws keeping personal data for longer than necessary.
“The ICO said the Talk Talk data breach was likely to cause “substantial distress” to those whose names, addresses and bank details were stolen. The ICO indicated that these details could be used for fraudulent purposes and that even the possibility of fraud happening would be distressing. Further if the data was misused or disclosed to an untrustworthy third party this would cause further distress exposing the individuals to blagging and possible fraud. The emphasis of ‘distress’ in relation to this particular breach is interesting given bank details were stolen and one might have expected discussion of the consequences. Be that as it may, distress matters because a recent court case (Vidal Hall –v- Google) held that only distress rather than financial damage was needed to open up a claim against a data controller for compensation under the Data Protection Act (DPA) and for the time being this ruling stands.”
Up until now, the highest fine the ICO had imposed was on an NHS Trust. Brighton & Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust was fined £325,000 after hard drives from its computers which contained the highly sensitive personal data of tens of thousands of patients and staff were found for sale on the internet.
Paul continued: “One thing that is particularly striking about the TalkTalk fine is that a fine of this size has been imposed on a private sector organisation. The outgoing Information Commissioner appeared to believe that private sector organisations were somehow better at data protection than the public sector. He is on record in the “Independent” of 23rd February 2014[1] describing local government organisations as “hopeless” in their handling of personal data, a view he then repeated at the ICO’s conference in Manchester two weeks later. If the TalkTalk fine indicates that the new ICO is rowing back from that position, it is a welcome development which may reassure those data protection commentators who were becoming concerned that undue regulatory attention seemed to be directed towards only public sector data protection breaches (though ironically it might be noted that the private sector has been hammered by the same regulator, in relation to cold calling, which is not covered by the DPA but by the PECR regulations).
“Once the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into direct effect in May 2018 (which it will, Brexit or not, in this author’s view), organisations will be obliged to report serious breaches and it may be that we then see a true reflection of just how secure organisations are across both sectors. However, be warned, the new Data Protection Regulation will also introduce higher maximum fines of up €20,000,000 or 4% of global turnover. If the GDPR had been in force today, TalkTalk could have faced a fine of £35million. Those who feel fines of that size are unlikely might draw an analogy with Aviva UK Life, which was fined £8.2 million this week by the Financial Conduct Authority. Aviva’s fine was because it had failed to ensure that it had adequate controls and oversight arrangements to effectively control the outsourced administration of client money.
“Fines of this size, and more importantly avoiding them, may encourage Board Members to put data management much higher up on the boardroom agenda. The reference to data management is deliberate. Whilst security is an important factor, an holistic approach is needed. Whilst good data security is important, the ICO also expects to see good management and has repeatedly emphasised that staff training will be taken into account in judging the adequacy of organisational measures required by the DPA 1998.”
(Source: BTO Solicitors LLP)
National land management charity, the Land Trust has responded to the Communities and Local Government Committee's inquiry into the future of public parks, urging Government to move beyond questioning the need for public parks and to recognize the value these spaces provide to the health and vitality of society and implement policy to support them.
Public parks are under severe threat. There is currently no legal obligation to fund and maintain public parks, so financial pressures on councils are resulting in cuts to parks maintenance budgets. Parks are used by so many people across society for a wide variety of reasons, delivering considerable benefits But the consequence of not having free and easy access to well-maintained public spaces could be detrimental, affecting all aspects of society, such as public health and wellbeing, increased long-term economic costs and social breakdown.
The recent Heritage Lottery Fund’s 2016 State of UK Public Parks report backs this up, demonstrating that parks are used regularly by over 37 million people each year, and good quality parks are helping to tackle many of society’s greatest challenges, from childhood obesity to a changing climate.
In its response, the Land Trust demonstrates that:
As such the Land Trust wants Government to:
Euan Hall, Chief Executive of the Land Trust said "We need to acknowledge the vital roles that parks and public green spaces play within communities. By establishing the policies and sustainable investment models for the long-term management of these spaces, our economy and public health and wellbeing will benefit, whilst pressures across multiple public services will ease. However, this needs central and local Government support, to put the structures and funding in place.”
(Source: the Land Trust)
