What is ‘agile working’ and how is it likely to affect you? Jocelyn Anderson talked to Virginia Clegg, Senior Partner elect of national firm DAC Beachcroft, to find out.

Agile working is beginning to gather momentum. It’s a concept that has been around for a few years, but it has come into sharp focus recently in the legal market because of its adoption by a number of firms, including Herbert Smith, Wedlake Bell, DAC Beachcroft and, after an announcement in August, Clifford Chance. Indications are that this new idea is likely to be taken up increasingly over the next few years, and that it is going to touch the working lives of many Legal Secretaries quite soon.

You become an achiever by achieving your goals. If you achieve your goals, you’re an achiever. If you don’t achieve your goals, you’re not an achiever.

This is a simple, binary way to think about achievement. To achieve means to reach, attain or accomplish. What you choose to reach, attain or accomplish is up to you.

The difference between an achiever and a non-achiever is largely a matter of attention. Non-achievers give their goals little attention, if they bother to set goals at all. Non-achievers reach, attain or accomplish something other than their goals — and quite often that is someone else’s goals, without consciously making those goals their own.

Here is a selection of vacancies from our Legal Secretary Jobs Board this month:

Legal Secretary – Personal Injury

Location:  London

Salary:  £33,500

Closing Date: 11/10/15

Leigh Day is urgently seeking a Legal Secretary, to assist a Partner within our Personal Injury department. The successful applicant will hold a responsible position providing secretarial and litigation support to the Partner.

Disputes in property and conveyancing do not often find their way into the Law Reports, but there are two areas of conveyancing practice — one recent (2015 in the High Court, Chancery Division) and the other not so recent (November 2013, which went to the Court of Appeal) — which apply to common aspects of pre-contract searches and enquiries and which are therefore worth looking at. I’ll deal with the former in this article and the latter next month.

In June a landmark case involving a husband hiding his assets from his wife finally worked its way to the Supreme Court.

Michael Prest is a wealthy oil trader. A High Court judge ruled in 2011 that he was worth at least £37.5 million at the time. His former wife said he may be worth much more, but in any event the judge, Mr Justice Moylan, ordered Michael Prest to pay his former wife £17.5 million. Now although the figures are large, there is nothing otherwise remarkable about the judgement, except that Mr Prest tried to hide behind company law to avoid paying the £17.5 million divorce settlement.

An exclusion clause is a type of clause that appears in a contract when one party tries to limit or exclude itself from liability. If the law did not prevent it, then large companies would use and abuse these clauses to protect themselves. Consumers have already “agreed” to hundreds of terms and conditions when they buy goods and services, so the laws protecting them from unfair exclusion clauses are important. In this article we will review what statutory controls are in place to protect consumers and consider recent changes to the law.

The two key statutes that control the use of exclusion clauses are

• the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, and
• the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999.

The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 (UCTA)

Have you ever authorised a payment from your bank account with a PIN, checked off an “I agree” box on a website or acknowledged delivery of a package by signing with a stylus on the delivery man’s electronic pad? The chances are that most of us have done all of those things within the past few weeks. Every time we did so, we were “e-signing” a contract or other document. In fact, as I’ll make clear shortly, we were not only e-signing but also “digitally signing” — and yes, there is a difference between the two. But whichever way you do it, signing documents without a traditional pen has become an integral part of modern life.

It won’t have escaped your attention that your boss’s continuing professional development (CPD) obligations have changed quite dramatically over the past couple of years. From a mandatory 16 hours per year, the minimum annual learning requirement for solicitors has been reduced to zero, and CPD has been replaced by “continuing competence”. When the rules for your boss have been relaxed, you may question the importance of CPD for yourself. CPD, however, remains one of the biggest opportunities for all Legal Secretaries and PAs.

Taking a set amount of CPD every year increases your skill set, gives you more content for your CV and probably will enhance your earning power. But there’s also the more straightforward pleasures of being able to understand more about the background of your job and reviving your interest in your work when you’re feeling a bit jaded. 

Here is a selection of vacancies from our Legal Secretary Jobs Board this month:

Family Law Secretary – Acorn Law North West Ltd

Location:  Manchester

Salary:  £21,000

Closing Date: 23/08/16

The role is to be a Secretary within a small team of secretaries working for some of the best Family Law Solicitors in the North West whose regional, national and global client bank range from persons earning £60,000 plus pa to high net worth Captains of Industry, Media stars, sporting stars and personalities. Some clients are self- made entrepreneurs worth hundreds of millions of pounds and others are landed gentry.

View the full job description here: 

Whether you work for a big firm or a small one, you’ve probably noticed a renewal of interest in money laundering issues on the part of your principals in recent months. The Solicitors’ Regulation Authority (SRA) has made money laundering one of its key priorities this year, and has already carried out a number of inspections of money laundering procedures in bigger firms, not always it appears with results considered satisfactory. The SRA’s initiative will be followed later this year by new money laundering regulations in the UK, which will create additional responsibilities on solicitors to find out who is in control of suspect companies or trusts, and to prevent lawyers (among others) being used to facilitate terrorist financing. All in all, this is a good time to refresh your memory on the basic principles of the money laundering rules, and where necessary to ask for further training and guidance.