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London Solicitors Litigation Association

Happy New Year to all our members. Welcome to our newsletter featuring some of our most recent and future activities. As always, for more details please visit our website by clicking here.

LSLA News

Autumn Lecture Series
The final lecture in our Autumn Series took place at the end of November when Laurie Rabinowitz QC of One Essex Court spoke on the “Interpretation of Contracts and the admissibility of evidence of subjective intention”. Laurie presented an informative lecture in which he looked at the interpretation of contracts and in particular the extent to which extraneous evidence, including pre-contractual negotiations, is now admissible.

Spring Lecture Series
The Spring Lecture Series has now been put together. Full details will be circulated to members and are available on our website. The lectures planned are:

• Tuesday 31 March 2009 Dinah Rose QC “Holding the Regulator to Account”
• Tuesday 7 April 2009 Michael Beloff QC “Closed Minds on Open Justice?”
• Tuesday 28 April 2009 Tim Dutton QC “The Aftermath: The Legal Profession after the Credit Crisis”
• Wednesday 20 May 2009 Jonathan Crow QC “Business as usual for Company Directors?”

LSLA AGM and AGM Dinner – Diary Date
The AGM and AGM dinner will be at held at Lovells on 17 March 2009. David Gold will be our speaker at the dinner. David is the senior partner of Herbert Smith and former head it its litigation and arbitration department. He is well known for acting in the Tottenham Hotspur/Terry Venables litigation and for John Reid in his disputes with Michael Flatley (of Riverdance) and Sir Elton John. Chatham house rules apply so the evening should be both informative and entertaining.

Recent Press
Our president David Greene appeared in an article in the New Law Journal critising the proposals to replace the current Practice Direction on Protocols as appeared in November’s edition of this newsletter.

Legal News

The Commercial Court Practice Reforms
The Commercial Court Long Trials Working Party has settled a questionnaire to collate feedback on the trial period of the reforms. The LSLA has been heavily involved in this and has helped in preparing the questions. We should like to assimilate responses from our members for the purposes of a global response.

A copy of the questionnaire is attached to this newsletter. We ask all representatives of member firms to obtain input from their colleagues with a view to providing answers to the questionnaire before 26 January 2009. Please send your completed questionnaire back to us at Francesca.Kaye@russell-cooke.co.uk for inclusion in our response. There is no need to name yourself if you would like your response to be anonymous. Irrespective of the email address from which we receive your response, if you do not include your name at the bottom we certainly will ensure that your comments are kept anonymous.

Alternatively you could send you completed questionnaire to Mr Justice Flaux, who is handling the Commercial Court’s collation of feedback. His email address is MrJustice.Flaux@judiciary.gsi.gov.uk.

The Commercial Court Working Party and practitioners will be meeting on 26 January 2009.

Law Society consultation paper on Contingency Fees
The Law Society has issued a consultation paper on Contingency Fees which seeks views on a number of issues about the funding of civil litigation and, in particular, contingency fees and third party funding. A copy of the paper is on our website.

The LSLA is putting together a sub-committee to consider the issues and draft a response on behalf of its members to be provided the Law Society by 31 March. If you would like your views to be included in our response, please send these to Georgina Squire at Georgina.Squire@rkllp.co.uk.