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The entire civil and administrative justice system needs to be integrated and reformed, according to a paper published by the Nuffield Foundation this morning. All eight frontline regulators and their oversight regulator should be replaced with a single independent regulator for legal professionals, it adds.

Access to civil justice should be through a “single, uncomplicated portal, readily identifiable to users”, says the paper, called Resolving Disputes: a Framework for Holistic Reform. Legal claims against the NHS for medical negligence should be replaced by a no-blame compensation scheme, in the author’s view.

How realistic are these proposals? What would they cost? What chance is there that they’ll be put into effect? Those were among the questions I put to Dr Christopher Hodges OBE, emeritus professor of justice systems at the University of Oxford, when I interviewed him about his proposals for this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks.

My weekly podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can listen to a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Our walls are festooned with pictures of old white men, the treasurer (elected head) of Gray’s Inn said last week. Sir Andrew McFarlane was about to redress the balance by unveiling a painting of Edith Hesling (1899-1971) the first woman to be called to the bar by Gray’s — one of the four inns of court that train and support barristers.

That was in 1923 and Hesling then established a busy and wide-ranging practice in Manchester. Her career-defining moment came in 1946 when she became the first woman to preside in the county court.

Hesling married in 1927 but continued to practise under her maiden name, an unconventional move at the time. When her daughter Anne became a barrister in 1951, they became the first mother-and-daughter at the English bar.

Helen Airey, one of Hesling’s granddaughters, practised as a solicitor. And she was at Gray’s Inn last Thursday to see her own daughter help McFarlane unveil Hesling’s portrait. Deborah Airey was called by Gray’s in 2024 and has recently joined 7BR chambers after completing her pupilage there.

To hear her great-grandmother’s advice to those who might follow her — and to watch the unveiling — click the ► symbol above.

The portrait was made by Keith Breeden RP, whose pictures of Lady Rose of Colmworth and Lord Etherton GBE are already on display at Gray’s. He also painted the lady chief justice for Inner Temple. Unlike them, of course, Hesling was not painted from life.

I should explain why Hesling’s gown appears in my recording to be decorated with ghostly green lights. Unusually, the frame is glazed and the glass has been coated to reduce reflections. But it was positioned on the easel at an angle that reflected the candle-shaped ceiling lights, rendered green by the glass coating. They are less intrusive now that the picture is safely up on the wall.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal will hold case management hearings today in two cases arising from the Post Office scandal. One involves a former general counsel at the Post Office accused of failing to cooperate with the recent public inquiry. The other involves a solicitor who represented former postmasters wrongly accused of dishonesty.

These hearings are being held remotely and will be livestreamed to the public on Zoom. A third case management hearing today involves clients who faced unexpected costs orders after claiming compensation for faulty cavity wall insulation.

What do these hearings involve? Will Jane MacLeod, the former Post Office lawyer, be represented at the hearing? Does her failure to attend the public inquiry amount to disciplinary matter at all? And — given that the tribunal has no say in which cases are referred to it by the Solicitors Regulation Authority — how will the tribunal handle as many as 20 cases that may brought against lawyers accused of prosecuting innocent postmasters?

Those are among the questions I put to Alison Kellett yesterday in the first broadcast interview given by the tribunal’s president since it was created by parliament just over 50 years ago. Kellett (pictured) talks sympathetically on this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks about the mistakes made by all solicitors — even her — and what happens when solicitors are told that their careers have just come to an end.

My weekly podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can listen to a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Sudan’s military leaders built a stockpile of chemical weapons that they tried to conceal after chlorine bombs had been used against rebel forces, the Washington Post reported on 5 September. Videos, documents and intercepted communications portray a secretive Sudanese military unit said to have produced chlorine-based munitions for use against the paramilitary group fighting the army for control of the country, the New York Times added on the same day.

The allegations, attributed to unnamed Middle Eastern security and intelligence officials, have been denied by Sudan but are regarded as credible by Western observers. Although they deal with events in 2024 and sanctions were subsequently imposed by the United States, no action appears to have been taken to enforce Sudan’s obligations under an international treaty on chemical weapons that came into force nearly 30 years ago.

That shows the weakness of international law and, in particular, the United Nations as it is currently constituted, I was told last week by Santiago Oñate Laborde OBE (hon), a former Mexican politician, former ambassador of Mexico to the United Kingdom and former legal adviser to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons — the international body responsible for implementing the chemical weapons convention.

Oñate (pictured above) was speaking on A Lawyer Talks. My weekly podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can listen to a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

We are not living in an era of change but a change of era, writes Professor Richard Susskind in the 30th anniversary edition of his classic book on the future of law. Describing the emergence of artificial general intelligence — AGI — as the single most significant technological advance in the history of humanity, he tells me we could rapidly, see the development of systems “that are unfathomably more capable than us”. Not planning for AGI now would, at the very least, amount to “a dereliction of duty” by senior lawyers.

As a lawyer who has been writing about artificial intelligence for 45 years, Susskind (pictured) is uniquely placed to take the long view. I had the advantage of having spoken to him when I wrote about the need for regulation at the beginning of last week and again at the end of last week.

He had recorded an interview with me shortly before concerns were expressed by researchers, by industry leaders and even by the King. Sir Ed Davey is to call today for a global non-proliferation treaty to halt the development of super-intelligent AI when he makes the leader’s speech at the Liberal Democrat conference, the Guardian reports.

But Susskind was, of course, ahead of the news — not just when recording A Lawyer Talks but in writing The Future of Law – Reflections and Predictions, to be published by OUP on Thursday. His interview can be heard now.

My weekly podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can listen to a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

New legislation is needed to regulate the use of artificial intelligence, a parliamentary committee recommends today. The joint committee on human rights says the law should prohibit the development and provision of very powerful AI systems known as artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence.

MPs and peers say these advanced systems — which I’ll be exploring in next week’s podcast — risk causing widespread and very serious harm, including the capacity to evade effective human control. In the meantime, says the committee’s well-timed report, legislation should ban the use of AI in ways that are inconsistent with respect for human rights, such as subliminal techniques, emotional inference and inappropriate use of profiling or biometric data.

No legislation has been introduced even though the party’s manifesto in 2024 promised that a Labour government would “ensure the safe development and use of AI models by introducing binding regulation on the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models”. In the King’s speech that year, ministers said they would “seek to establish the appropriate legislation to place requirements on those working to develop the most powerful artificial intelligence models”.

The use of AI by lawyers will be on the agenda of a conference tomorrow being held by the City of London Law Society and the City of London Corporation at Guildhall. Though much of the meeting will be closed to reporters, Colin Passmore KC (hon), chair of the City of London Law Society, was happy to discuss the challenges facing corporate lawyers in an interview for A Lawyer Talks.

Passmore (pictured) told me last week of his concerns about AI, particularly what he regards as its current unreliability. He also responded to some of the ethical concerns emerging from the Post Office scandal that I raised with John Hyde in last week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks.

My regular podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Who’s to blame for the Post Office scandal that saw innocent postmasters sent to prison for crimes which never happened? The lawyers accused of keeping Post Office executives in the dark? Or the Post Office executives accused of setting up lawyers to fail?

Why didn’t the regulators step in? Are they doing enough now? Or must we look again at the system of general counsel and in-house lawyers that seems to suit large corporations so well?

Those are among the issues explored in a new book by John Hyde, who covered the public inquiry into the multi-million-pound fiasco for the Law Society Gazette. Indefensible — how lawyers failed to stop the Post Office scandal will be published next Tuesday by Bristol University Press. This week, Hyde (pictured) agreed to share his insights with me on the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks.

My regular podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

A criminal court built over the course of a weekend “worked absolutely perfectly”, according to inspectors who examined the UK’s military court service. Because courts martial may sit anywhere in the world, the service has a fully equipped “court in a box” that it can set up in any suitable building.

Anthony Rogers, chief inspector of HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate, was invited by the military court service to assess its work. His inspectorate’s report is now published.

In an interview for A Lawyer Talks, Rogers (pictured) told me that there were lessons that the civilian courts could learn from how cases were tried by the military — though he stressed that the numbers of military trials was just a tiny fraction of those heard in the Crown Court. We discussed the differences between military trial and civilian trials — and how decisions were taken on which system should be used if both had jurisdiction.

Inspectors found the military court service to be an effective, well-led and highly regarded organisation that had a clear operational purpose, visible leadership and strong working relationships with other parts of the justice system. The inspectorate’s main recommendation was that it should adopt a single, secure digital court listing and case progression system in place of its current arrangements.

My regular podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Few British lawyers have a better understanding of genocide than Sir Howard Morrison KCMG CBE KC. In 2016, as a judge of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, he voted to convict the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić on one charge of genocide and acquit him on another. On the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks, the international lawyer said he was concerned to see the legal definition of genocide being watered down in public discourse.

The main purpose of our interview was to discuss Morrison’s latest appointment as co-chair of the newly established Council for the Examination of Atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For three decades, he told me, the Congolese people had endured atrocities on a scale reminiscent of the darkest chapters of the modern history. And yet the world has hardly registered this. The council’s task was to raise international awareness, to make an accurate historical record and — “hopefully, eventually” — to provide reparations for victims.

The Democratic Republic of Congo — DRC for short — had suffered two civil wars between 1996 and 2003, following the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda. During just 100 days in 1994, about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were systematically killed by Hutu militias in Rwanda. But Tutsi forces then seized control and some two million Hutus, including civilians and some of those responsible for the genocide, fled across the border to what is now the DRC.

The conflict there has worsened in recent years. As Morrison told me, the latest international violence involves a battle for eastern DRC’s huge mineral resources.

International Criminal Court

My picture shows Morrison in his robes as a judge of the International Criminal Court, where he sat from 2012 to 2021. He told me last week he had been disappointed by the way the court had handled the allegations of sexual misconduct against its former prosecutor, Karim Khan KC, that led to Khan’s dismissal last month. Morrison did not believe the lengthy process had been fair or impartial.

More generally, the court had not achieved everything it might have done during its first quarter-century, he thought, because some of the world’s “big players” had chosen not to join it. As one of its former judges, Morrison took the view that “mature democracies” had nothing to fear from a court of last resort that was not allowed to intervene when countries were dealing properly with allegations against their own citizens.

My regular podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

If two people live together for a while — and perhaps share a child — does that give them the same sort of rights as a married couple or civil partners? Most of my readers will know that the law of England and Wales does not recognise so-called common law marriage.

But should it? You have three days left to tell the government whether you think ministers should introduce what a former justice secretary called “some of the biggest reforms to family law in decades”.

As I pointed out in June, David Lammy’s consultation paper on cohabitation had been slipped out with little fanfare on a Friday afternoon earlier that month. Despite my best efforts, new research by the market research company Survation suggests that most people haven’t heard of his plans. Perhaps that’s what the Ministry of Justice was quietly hoping for.

“The fact that some may think they have rights is no justification for taking away the liberty of others,” Baroness Deech DBE KC (hon) said in a House of Lords debate last month. Responding to the government consultation, the cross-bench peer said that reform should support needy people while preserving the equally important principles of consent, personal autonomy and legal certainty.

Deech (pictured) explains her thinking on the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. My regular podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Children aged from 10 to 17 are being arrested by the police and detained overnight in adult custody suites because more appropriate responses are not available in England and Wales, a major research project has found. The researchers recommend clearer guidance for police officers and a presumption in favour of less intrusive alternatives.

Six out of 10 children arrested by response officers — even for something as trivial as a domestic tantrum — are released with no further action. But the researchers have found that, far from being a deterrent, detaining children in custody acts as a gateway to the youth justice system.

The researchers conclude that the government’s commitment to a “child first” principle — treating young suspects as a children first and offenders second — will remain no more than a principle for as long as decisions on whether a child enters the criminal justice system are made by police officers who lack the training, guidance, information, institutional support and input from partner agencies needed to make decisions in a fully-informed way.

Academics worked collaboratively on the study with Greater Manchester Police, the Metropolitan Police, Surrey Police and South Wales Police.

Four forces have already accepted an earlier recommendation from the project about the length of time that children should be detained by the police. Although the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 allows adults and children to be detained for up to 24 hours, those forces now work on the basis of a 12-hour maximum for children aged from 10 to 17. In Surrey, this has reduced their average detention period from about 11 hours to just over 7½ hours.

The research was led by Dr Vicky Kemp from the University of Nottingham and Dr Miranda Bevan of King’s College London. Their report — Children and Policing in England and Wales: Adopting a Child First Approach — is supported by the Nuffield Foundation and was published last week.

I interviewed Kemp (pictured) yesterday for the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. My podcast, in which you can also hear from children who spoke to the researchers, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Eleven years ago this month, Sir Christopher Pitchford formally opened the Undercover Policing Inquiry. It was expected to take three years and Pitchford was able to continue sitting as an appeal judge.

Nearly two years later he stood down because of ill-health. The former High Court judge Sir John Mitting was appointed to replace Pitchford in 2017. Though the inquiry has not yet concluded, he too is planning to retire after publishing his latest interim report.

According to the Home Office, this is “an opportune moment to reflect on whether the inquiry as currently structured remains the most effective means of achieving its aims”. Ministers are “concerned about the length and cost of the inquiry” — more than £138 million so far.

But victims’ groups say they are deeply concerned by what they fear is an attempt to shut the inquiry down. It has yet to consider some of the most important evidence relating to abuses that took place under the existing regulatory framework, they add. “Police actions to disrupt and stall proceedings… prevented the inquiry from even starting to hear evidence for the first six years and continue to cause delays”.

How much difference would a duty of candour and assistance have made? That’s what a government bill agreed by the House of Commons last week will establish once it becomes law. Andy Burnham said that “in passing this momentous piece of legislation, which will change the way this country thinks about and works towards justice, we are truly rewiring the state and passing power from the authorities to the hands of ordinary people”.

Is he right? An an interview for A Lawyer Talks, I put that question to Andrew Williams (pictured), professor of law at the University of Warwick and author of a new report for the Nuffield Foundation called Public inquiries: are they fit for purpose?

My podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

LeO “needs to transform”, his handler said this month. LeO, in this context, is the legal ombudsman and his handler is the chair of the Office for Legal Complaints — which, in turn, reports to the Legal Services Board.

One enhancement — if not quite a transformation — is suggested in a report today by Blind Justice UK, a small charity that bases its research on published data. I’ve covered two of its reports so far. One in April accused law firms of selectively promoting their consumer reviews and another in May suggested that regulators could do more to identify potential defaults.

Its latest research credits LeO for a policy of naming all service-providers involved in complaints that have been resolved by an ombudsman’s final decision. But the report criticises Leo for removing these names after a year. Blind Justice UK has identified nearly 11,500 deleted decisions but it estimates the total to be between 24,000 and 28,000. Only 939 can currently be found online.

Why does that matter? To find out, I thought it was time to interview Edward Romain (pictured), the charity’s founder and chief executive, for any episode of A Lawyer Talks.

I’ll be putting his concerns to the legal ombudsman and the Office for Legal Complaints chair after the summer holidays. In the meantime, LeO and his handler have provided me with this comment:

We are currently consulting on a number of proposals covering our scheme rules, case fees and the principle of publishing ombudsman decisions in full. The consultation seeks views on whether publication of all ombudsman final decisions would help consumers make more informed choices, encourage learning and improvement across the legal sector and align LeO with best practice across other ombudsman schemes.

We welcome responses from all interested stakeholders and will carefully consider the feedback received before reaching any decisions. As that work progresses, we will also consider the wider issues that flow from any changes to our publication approach, including how decisions are made available and for how long.

My podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission is not a failing institution, inspectors said in a report published yesterday. In the 60 cases they examined, caseworkers had reached the right decisions in their recommendations to commissioners. But in too many cases staff investigating suspected miscarriages of justice went down unnecessary avenues that led to drift, delays and wasted resources.

Dame Vera Baird KC, who became chair of the commission just over a year ago and commissioned the report from HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate, told me yesterday that she had accepted all its recommendations. Interviewed for A Lawyer Talks, she discussed the steps she had been taking to bring together a team of caseworkers, team managers, executives and commissioners who had notoriously worked from an office that was almost completely empty every day.

In my column for today’s Law Society Gazette, I examine how things went wrong and analyse Baird’s plans to put them right.

My podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

“This consultation,” wrote David Lammy just over three weeks ago, “proposes some of the biggest reforms to family law in decades — bringing the law into the 21st century, helping families feel better off and increasing protections for millions.” Top marks if you already know what he’s talking about; family lawyers need not apply.

If you haven’t heard about the justice secretary’s consultation paper on cohabitation, don’t be too hard on yourself; his proposals were slipped out on a Friday afternoon with little fanfare. Because, perhaps, the government was nervous about being seen to undermine marriage? That was the first question I put to Professor Sharon Thompson (pictured) when I interviewed her yesterday for the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks.

As she explained, the consultation paper is not just about cohabitants; the government is also planning to put nuptial agreements on a statutory footing and to codify the law on financial remedies following marriage or civil partnership. Will we see legislation along these lines? Or should ministers take another look at the details?

Thompson is professor of law at the University of Cardiff and author of a well-timed new book called The Road to Equal Partnership: Reforming the Financial Consequences of Divorce, just published by Bristol University Press. As you can hear, she has some interesting views on the government’s plans.

My regular podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

The employment tribunal system is broken, lawyers dealing with workplace disputes will tell you. It can take three or four years to get a hearing and the delays are expected to get much worse next year. Throwing money at the problem is unlikely to work, even if there was any to spare. But a new academic study of the problem may have some of the answers — both for people who use the tribunals and for those who run them.

Reimagining Employment Dispute Resolution and Enforcement has three authors: Dr Maayan Menashe, who’s senior lecturer in law at City St George’s, University of London; Sarah Fraser Butlin KC who practises from Cloisters chambers; and Catherine Barnard, professor of European Union and employment law at the University of Cambridge.

Barnard (pictured) is an old friend and I was delighted to interview her yesterday for the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. My podcast interview — recorded at breakfast time, as you may hear — is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

There can’t be many compensation claims with legal costs in the millions and damages in double-digit billions. Perhaps one of them is Trump v BBC — I have updated yesterday’s piece to include the judge’s threat to throw out the case after the president’s lawyers missed a deadline. But not even Donald Trump is claiming as much as arbitrators have awarded the former majority shareholders in Yukos Oil — which was Russia’s largest privately owned energy business until the Putin government appropriated its assets between 2003 and 2007. With interest, the amount they are now owed is more than $66 billion.

Risking millions in the hope of recovering billions is not for the faint-hearted. I wrote a detailed account of the Yukos claim at the beginning of 2008 and returned to it in 2016, then in 2021, in 2024 and once again in 2024. But it was not until I read Suing the Kremlin, a new book by the former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixsmith, that I began to understand how a few individuals acquired unimaginable wealth and why some if them paid for it with their lives.

Sixsmith shared his insights into the case — and gave me his view of the outcome — when I recorded this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks at his home in London. My podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

While ministers insist that the only way of ending delays in the Crown Court is to limit the use of juries, a judge responsible for non-jury trials has achieved what’s been described as an “inspiring success” in reducing backlogs.

Through collaboration across the criminal justice system of Scotland, Aisha Anwar KC (hon), sheriff principal of Glasgow and Strathkelvin and president of the Sheriff Appeal Court, has managed to cut the number of cases awaiting trial in the summary sheriff courts from over 30,000 during the pandemic to 9,000 at the last count. Scheduled summary trials are now 27% below the pre-pandemic baseline.

It was Lord Pentland, Scotland’s most senior judge, who described the summary case management project led by Anwar as an inspiring success that demonstrated the value of close engagement between the judiciary, prosecutors, defence lawyers, police and the court service.

When Anwar joined me to record an episode of A Lawyer Talks last Friday, I asked the sheriff principal whether she thought something similar would work in England and Wales. We also found time to talk about the lighthouses that she had been due to visit that afternoon.

My podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Gray’s Inn is paying tribute to an illustrious former member, 400 years after his death. Sir Francis Bacon was one of the most influential figures in British intellectual history and a lawyer whose life and career were deeply intertwined with the inn of court where he felt most at home.

At a dinner in hall tonight, Professor Alan Stewart (pictured) — one of the leading experts on the former lord chancellor’s multifaceted achievements — will be speaking about Bacon’s lifelong association with the inn that he joined in 1576 and where he was living shortly before his death 50 years later.

Stewart, a professor of literature in New York, kindly agreed to share some of his thoughts with me for the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. He argued that Bacon could properly be regarded as a true Renaissance man. I suggested that his willingness to accept favours and his attempts to live above his means made him sound surprisingly modern.

Readers may remember that I previewed tonight’s celebration of the inn’s former treasurer (elected head) in a short film earlier this year. That’s still free to view:

My podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. But others can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

In a judgment published last Thursday, a circuit judge sitting in Walsall explained that he was referring two solicitors to their regulator because false AI-generated case citations had been submitted in an appeal he was hearing.

“Lawyers who cite fictitious cases must face serious consequences,” said Judge Grimshaw, “and in the current environment, where this is a problem that is significant (and indeed seems to be growing), the guidance in Ayinde indicates that judges should take a robust approach.”

Mahmood Hussain, a consultant at AML Legal in Dudley, had acknowledged that documents citing false judgments had been prepared with the help of a paralegal. The judge observed that an appeal bundle and a covering email had apparently been signed by Kossar Qureshi, the firm’s director.

It’s a cautionary tale for solicitors. But the perils of using artificial intelligence may be even greater for barristers. To help them balance risks and rewards, their regulator will be launching new guidance later today. Strikingly, it encourages members of the bar to take a risk-based approach when using new technology.

To set the scene, I’ve been discussing the new guidance with the Bar Standards Board’s director of strategy, policy and insights, Ewen MacLeod (pictured), on the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks.

My weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

As presaged in the King’s speech, the government’s Courts and Tribunals Bill was reintroduced in the House of Commons yesterday. It picks up where it left off, though no date has yet been announced for the bill’s report stage and third reading.

Will the government’s plans to limit jury trial ever reach the House of Lords? Or will Andy Burnham’s bid for the Labour leadership mean that we end up with a more modest set of reforms? That’s one of the questions I explore in my analysis of the government’s legislative programme for the Law Society Gazette.

After writing the piece, I tried out some of my ideas on Kirsty Brimelow KC, chair of the bar (pictured). Far from exploiting the political turmoil that was deepening even as we spoke yesterday afternoon, the barristers’ leader said stability was to be preferred.

I took the opportunity to ask Brimelow about her comments on Rajiv Menon KC, the defence counsel who is waiting to hear whether his remarks to a jury will lead to contempt of court proceedings, a disciplinary investigation or no further action. Readers will recall that I wrote about the issues last week and again this week.

Brimelow said on Wednesday that she hoped this “troubling episode” was now at an end. Did that mean she thought barristers in a criminal trial could legitimately ignore directions from a judge on what a jury could be told?

You can hear Brimelow’s response in the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. My weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

The international legal order is facing profound disruption, a leading lawyer said last night. Professor Lord Verdirame KC said that institutions created or expanded after the end of the Cold War in 1989 had “too often responded with misguided moralistic fervour and interpretative maximalism, stretching mandates beyond what states consented to and thereby inviting the backlash that now jeopardises their legitimacy and survival”.

Verdirame, a practising barrister, professor of international law and non-affiliated peer, was delivering a lecture to the Society of Conservative Lawyers in memory of its long-serving member and honorary secretary Pamela Thomas. The society will be publishing his lecture in due course.

In an interview yesterday for A Lawyer Talks, Verdirame discussed the pivotal role of the United States and the current limitations of international law. “The international legal order is not falling apart,” he said. But it was now in crisis.

My weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

A year has passed since the UK Supreme Court decided that when parliament used the terms “man” and “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 it was referring to biological sex, not acquired gender. That seemed clear enough, but some academics appear not to have understood it.

How can that be? And will things be any clearer next month when the government publishes the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s long-awaited code of practice on services, public functions and associations?

To discuss those questions — and the unexpected importance of personal pronouns — I went to see Dr Michael Foran, an associate professor of law at Keble College Oxford. His new book, Sex, Gender Identity and the Law, is formally published by Cambridge University Press on 7 May. You can hear our conversation in the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks.

My weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page. And my interview with Lord Hodge, the judge who wrote the ruling, is here.

A former chair of the bar has called for a wide-ranging review of the way that expert evidence is used in the courts of England and Wales. Speaking to one of the City of London livery companies just before Easter, Sam Townend KC said the use of experts had led to “something of a crisis in judicial and public confidence”.

He told the Worshipful Company of Arbitrators that the development of the professional expert witness in recent years challenged the principle that such evidence should be independent. As examples, he referred to the trial of Lucy Letby and the use of psychologists in family cases where so-called “parental alienation” has been alleged.

Townend has been speaking about his concerns in the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. Update 9 June: his lecture has now been published.

My regular podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Sir Andrew McFarlane never expected to become a barrister. He had no particular interest in family law until he took the case that changed his life. His rapid promotion from the High Court to the Court of Appeal came as a surprise. The post of president of the family division was not one he aspired to. And he certainly did not expect to serve as the senior family judge of England and Wales for as long as eight years.

All this he tells me without any sense of humblebragging or false modesty. But there is one achievement that he looks back on with pride. It was a major reform that is bound to feature in the tributes he’ll receive at a valedictory ceremony later today. But I suspect it went unnoticed by most court users at the time.

Better known is his support for pathfinder courts, as they were described for want of a better term. Earlier this month, the justice secretary announced that child-focused courts, as they are now to be called, will be introduced across England and Wales once the necessary funding can be found. In the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks, McFarlane explains how a simple innovation has led to a wholly different dynamic in the family courts.

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New sentencing laws take effect next week. Judges and magistrates in England and Wales will be able to suspend sentences of up to three years. And courts will have to suspend sentences of not more than 12 months unless there are “exceptional circumstances”.

Because very short sentences are generally thought to be counter-productive, supporters of the reforms say we should all be safer as a result. And, at least to begin with, the prison population should begin to come down. But Andrea Coomber KC (hon), chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform (pictured), told me there were provisions in the Sentencing Act 2026 that may endanger the very people they are intended to protect. And Baroness Carr, the lady chief justice, made it clear that other provisions in the legislation could be used to undermine the important role played by sentencing guidelines.

You can read about Carr’s concerns in my column for this week’s Law Society Gazette.

And you can hear Coomber’s criticisms in the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. My weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

The rule of law, as a phrase, is opaque, the head of civil justice said this week. As Sir Geoffrey Vos explained, “non-lawyers and even many lawyers think it is about the enforcement of law against citizens rather than enforcing, or rather upholding, the rights of citizens against the state.”

The master of the rolls wondered if we could find a better term for the concept. He offered no suggestions himself. But if lawyers were going to continue using the phrase when speaking to those outside the legal profession, he thought they should at least say what it meant.

Vos continued:

We should explain that, as proponents of the rule of law, we are proponents of the clear and accessible predictability of the legal system, that we support open justice and access to fair justice for all, that we are seeking to protect the fundamental rights of all, and we support those states that exercise proportionate and accountable power over their citizens in good faith and those states that comply with their obligations under national and international law.

We should, perhaps, also explain that what we are talking about is not for the benefit or self-aggrandisement of the lawyers, but for the benefit of all citizens — to enable them to live and let live in a tolerant society where their rights are respected. It is, as I have said, all about tolerance and respect — not about protecting lawyers or even judges.

The second most senior judge in England and Wales was speaking at a meeting of the Alliance for Lawyers at Risk, a charity that brings together prominent members of the British legal community to support lawyers and human rights defenders throughout the world who face personal danger because of their professional work.

The alliance makes an annual award in memory of Sir Henry Brooke CMG (1936-2018), who was vice-president of the Court of Appeal from 2003 until his retirement in 2006. Brooke’s parents were both appointed to the House of Lords, as was his brother. A former president of the Society for Computers and Law, he launched a legal blog in 2015 that remains a model of its kind.

This year’s Henry Brooke award went to Ruth López (pictured), described by the judging panel as one of the most prominent and courageous defenders of the rule of law in El Salvador. Her investigations, the panel added, have brought to light issues such as unlawful spyware surveillance, political patronage networks and unconstitutional legislative measures that restrict and undermine public access to information.

Vos presented the award to Lopez’s husband. That was because her work as director of the anti-corruption and justice unit at Cristosal, a regional human rights organisation working across El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, led to her arrest and imprisonment last May. She has not been tried or convicted.

Action taken against López by the authorities in El Salvador has been widely condemned by lawyers’ groups. Last July, the American Bar Association selected her for its annual international human rights award.

To learn more about the Alliance for Lawyers at Risk — what it does and what impact its work can have — I spoke yesterday to its president, Dominic Grieve KC, the former Conservative MP who served as attorney general from 2010 to 2014 and then as chair of parliament’s intelligence and security committee.

While interviewing Grieve for the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks, I took the opportunity to ask him what he made of the advice thought to have been given to ministers by Lord Hermer KC, the current attorney general, on the lawfulness of military action against Iran by the US and Israel. That issue struck me as particularly timely ahead of a forthcoming discussion between Professor Lord Verdirame KC and Professor John Bew CMG:

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“Any decision about the care and treatment of a mentally incapacitated adult, including the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, must be taken in the patient’s best interests,” the Court of Appeal said on Tuesday. “There is no carve-out for ‘clinical decisions’,” the court added, overruling a decision by a highly experienced Court of Protection judge.

That conclusion is so broad that it cannot possibly be correct, a leading lawyer in the field of health and social care told me yesterday. Victoria Butler-Cole KC said the ruling means that practical advice issued by the British Medical Association to assist doctors when making decisions in the best interests of incapacitated adults is now wrong. She thought the ruling would cause widespread difficulties and should now be considered by the Supreme Court with the benefit of more time and full legal argument.

The one person who won’t benefit from any further appeal is the man at the heart of this tragic story. Robert Barnor, 68, suffered extensive and irreversible brain damage after a stroke nearly a year ago. He died last Friday, hours before a judge was due to consider whether a hospital’s decision to withdraw life-saving kidney dialysis would be in his best interests.

You can hear my interview with Butler-Cole (pictured) in the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. My weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol above.

How is it possible to enforce a judgment from the courts of one state against the government of another? That’s the topic I discuss on this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks. My guest is Jehad Mustafa, a partner at Farrer & Co who specialises in state immunity, and we spoke at the solicitors’ historic (and partly stone-floored) offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

He and I discussed two rulings delivered last month:

* In Ghanem Al-Masarir v Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the High Court awarded more than £3 million in damages to a UK-resident critic of Saudi Arabia who claimed the Saudis had hacked his phone and sent people to beat him up in the street.

* In COL v The United Arab Emirates, the High Court awarded more than £145,000 to a woman from the Philippines who was found to have been the victim of modern slavery after she had worked as a domestic servant for a UAE diplomat in London.

Another case mentioned in our discussion was Federal Republic of Nigeria v Ogbonna, decided by the president of the Employment Appeal Tribunal in 2011 (though reported in 2012).

What are the chances of individual claimants being able to recover even a penny of the compensation they were awarded against foreign states? The answer is more encouraging than I had thought.

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After months of uncertainty, the government is pressing ahead with its plans to curb the right to trial by jury in England and Wales. Legislation is to be introduced “next month”, a minister says. Sir Brian Leveson expects the government to publish its bill even sooner, he tells me in this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks.

The former head of criminal justice was talking to me about the second and final part of his report on the criminal courts, which recommends no fewer than 135 efficiency improvements. But inevitably we spent much of the interview discussing the structural reforms Leveson had recommended in part one of his review last July.

The most eye-catching of these is a new bench division of the crown court, which will try cases without a jury. Leveson thought it should consist of a judge and two magistrates but the government says it will be a judge sitting alone.

He was careful not to comment on the government’s proposals — or indeed on whether ministers might let magistrates sit in the bench division if concessions have to be made in the House of Lords. But Leveson was perfectly happy to tell me why he stood by his original recommendations — those that ministers had accepted and those they had not.

My column for this week’s Law Society Gazette looks at how Leveson’s initial proposals were handled by the government. It also reports how he feels about the government’s decision to remove a defendant’s right to choose jury trial on charges that can be tried in the magistrates’ court. He would have limited the right to elect trial by jury rather than abolished it outright.

Pieces I write for the Gazette are always free to read. The Gazette also carries a two-page analysis of Leveson’s latest recommendations by Monidipa Fouzder.

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This year will be a tipping point in which the majority of the legal industry will be AI-powered, a leading solicitor said in a comment released for publication this week. But what does that mean?

Is artificial intelligence going to take over from the real thing? Will lawyers no longer be needed?

“We predict that AI will create a huge dividing line between small, innovative firms that use it to rapidly accelerate and more traditional firms who choose to remain set in their approach,” explained Jonathan Waters, who founded Helix Law as a boutique litigation practice nearly 15 years ago.

But what will the clients make of it? They may associate AI with non-existent cases cited by hapless lawyers or career-ending errors made by law enforcement chiefs.

To find out, I invited Waters to join me on A Lawyer Talks. His answers were both surprising and reassuring.

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As the High Court begins hearing allegations today that the publishers of the Daily Mail hacked into phones used by the Duke of Sussex and other public figures, I thought it would be a good time to look at the most successful phone hacking operation ever carried out by law enforcement organisations in the United Kingdom and across Europe.

Between 2016 and 2020, drug dealers and others involved in organised crime were using what they believed to be a secure messaging service called EncroChat. The system was cracked as a result of work by the Netherlands Forensic Institute. As a result, nearly 40,000 smartphones were infiltrated by the authorities and some 2,200 offenders were convicted in the UK alone.

But although courts in England and Wales found ways of declaring the evidence admissible, prosecutions were far from straightforward because the law does not allow material intercepted in the course of transmission to be used in evidence. Without intercept material, prosecutors have to rely on phone hacking — so-called “equipment interference” — to dig out stored data. But that’s not something the agencies like to talk about.

Among those calling for intercept evidence to be admissible is Professor Peter Sommer, an academic specialising in digital forensics, cyber security and electronic communications. In a recent paper, he drew on his experience as an expert witness in criminal prosecutions to explore some of the problems now facing the courts.

You can hear Sommer outlining his concerns — and explaining how EncroChat was cracked — in this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks. My weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can listen a short taster by clicking the ► symbol above.

Reducing the availability of jury trial is neither principled nor pragmatic, the incoming chair of the bar argued last night. In her inaugural address, Kirsty Brimelow KC said her first priority was to lead the Bar Council’s opposition to planned Ministry of Justice reforms.

She said:

The constitutional principle is deep — with its importance being cemented in 1670 when Edward Bushel and his fellow jurors, a disinterested group of property owners, would rather have gone to prison than convict the Quakers Penn and Mead of causing tumultuous assembly by preaching in Gracechurch Street…

The pragmatic points are that the reduction of juries would have no impact on the existing backlog as it would take effect towards the end of this parliament. Impact even then is highly uncertain. Meanwhile energy and focus are drained from implementing the urgent reforms now that would decrease the backlog.

You can hear Brimelow outlining her priorities in the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. As well as criminal justice reform, we discussed increasing the age of criminal responsibility; lawyers under attack; bullying and harassment at the bar; human rights; and violence against women and girls. I was particularly interested in Brimelow’s experience of witchcraft.

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Gibraltar’s senior police officer was “in effect… forced out” of his job in 2020 as a result of assertions by the British overseas territory’s acting governor Nick Pyle and the chief minister Fabian Picardo KC that they had lost confidence in him, an inquiry by a retired British High Court judge has found.

In a 700-page report published by the Gibraltar government on 23 December, Sir Peter Openshaw said he had no doubt that the real reason Picardo had lost confidence in Ian McGrail, the police commissioner, was that the Royal Gibraltar Police had obtained a search warrant against Picardo’s friend, James Levy KC, which the chief minister was “determined in one way or another to thwart”. Levy denied any wrongdoing and was never charged.

Picardo had misled the police authority, the inquiry found: “by suppressing the truth, he was in effect suggesting a falsehood”.

Openshaw said that although McGrail realised his position had become untenable after the governor and chief minister had lost confidence in him, he retired only because he believed he was being unfairly and unlawfully compelled to do so. He felt he was being put under improper pressure to alter the course of a live criminal investigation.

The former judge found that Picardo had behaved grossly improperly when he tried to interfere in an active criminal investigation. But when Openshaw’s report was published two days before Christmas, Picardo announced that he had been vindicated and the Gibraltar government had been exonerated.

The chief minister said:

Crucially, the report completely exonerates the government from the many spurious allegations made against it. I am also very pleased that the inquiry chairman has found that I genuinely believed the then commissioner of police lied to me. My reading of the report, therefore, is that it vindicates my position on this crucial issue.

Most of the barristers who took part in the inquiry are based in London. McGrail was represented by Adam Wagner KC from Doughty Street Chambers (pictured at the inquiry). On the latest edition of A Lawyer Talks, he told me about the inquiry’s findings and gave me his reaction to Picardo’s comments.

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With parliament and many of the courts not sitting, I can’t promise to publish a report every day over the next two or three weeks. But I don’t want 2025 to fade away without marking the 25th anniversary of White v White, a groundbreaking ruling from 2000 in which the UK’s most senior judges said that the division of joint property on the break-up of a marriage should be checked against the “yardstick of equality”.

The judgment was hugely influential but not widely reported at the time — perhaps because the lawyers concerned, and their clients, didn’t speak to journalists. But times change and earlier this month I went to interview Mrs White’s solicitor at the offices in Lincoln’s Inn where his firm — Payne Hicks Beach — has been based since 1770. On the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks, Simon Beccle told me about Pamela White and the irony of her victory a quarter of her century ago.

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In its report earlier this month on the collapse of a high-profile Chinese espionage case, parliament’s joint committee on the national security strategy found evidence of questionable decision-making, misaligned expectations and failures to take potential opportunities that could remedy problems.

“Some aspects are best described as shambolic,” the report added. “The government and Crown Prosecution Service must reflect… on how best to uphold public confidence in the integrity of the system in the face of public concern.” Ministers have until 3 February to respond.

In the meantime, I have been discussing the committee’s findings with Nick Vamos, a former head of special crime at the Crown Prosecution Service and now head of business crime at the law firm Peters & Peters. As you can hear in the latest edition of A Lawyer Talks, he was surprised at how badly his former employers had handled the case. Vamos explained how the CPS had got it wrong — even though we still don’t understand why.

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People respond to outcomes rather than reasoning, the deputy president of the UK Supreme Court told me last week. Lord Hodge was reflecting on the reaction to the court’s ruling in the For Women Scotland case, where he gave the leading judgment.

“We decided the question of statutory interpretation,” he explained, “and have left it to others to work out the consequences. And of course the Equality and Human Rights Commission has the unenviable task of giving guidance on this matter.”

The court delivered its ruling in April and the commission’s guidance has still not been approved by ministers, much to the frustration of its former chair Baroness Falkner of Margravine.

In the course of a wide-ranging interview for A Lawyer Talks, Hodge told me why he thought former judges should not comment on matters of political controversy. But he regarded it as acceptable to talk about the rule of law. I had to weave my way carefully round the restrictions but in the end I had a much better understanding of what the UK’s second most senior judge thinks about the great issues of the day, across the UK and beyond.

And since Hodge is not planning a formal valedictory speech when he retires at the end of this month, I took the opportunity to ask him for his reflections after 12 years in the Supreme Court — and his unique transformation into an English lawyer.

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We still don’t know why leaked government plans reported on Tuesday of last week — “juries will decide only murder, rape or manslaughter cases” — were so different from what ministers announced this Tuesday.

It turns out that jury trial will be retained for cases where the likely sentence is over three years and for all indictable-only offences. Examples given by the government include murder, manslaughter, endangering life, rape and other penetrative sex offences, aggravated burglary, blackmail, kidnapping, people-trafficking, rioting, terrorism offences, grievous bodily harm with intent, the most serious drug offences and some weapons offences.

So there are two possibilities: either the leaked document seen by other reporters was not an accurate account of the government’s plans or it was correct at the time it was circulated and ministers then modified their ambitions.

When I interviewed the courts minister Sarah Sackman MP on Wednesday, I asked her which it was. On the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks, you can hear how she answered.

I also took Sackman through detailed plans set out by the justice secretary in a written ministerial statement on Tuesday. During the interview, I began to understand why David Lammy had told MPs that we would have to wait until the next general election, due in 2029, before we could expect to see a fall in the crown court backlog.

I analyse Sackman’s account of the government’s wide-ranging plans in my latest column for the Law Society Gazette.

In my column, I also argue that public involvement in the criminal justice system should not be regarded as an immutable absolute. Putting it another way, I am not convinced by those who claim that we can substantially reduce the current unacceptable crown court delays without making significant structural changes. If you disagree, listen to Sackman and then add a comment below.

Lammy’s statement should be read in full. For convenience, I have extracted the half-dozen proposals that I asked Sackman to explain or justify:

* Magistrates’ courts’ sentencing powers will increase to 18 months, with provision to extend to 24 months if necessary to relieve pressure in the crown court.

* The right of defendants to elect for a jury trial will be removed, meaning that it will be for the court to determine where a case will be heard based on the severity of offences.

* The appeals process from magistrates’ courts will be reformed so that automatic appeals to the crown court in criminal cases are replaced with a permission stage, limited to points of law.

* A new bench division will be established in the crown court for triable-either-way cases with likely sentences of three years or less, heard by a judge alone.

* Jury trials will remain for indictable-only offences and cases with likely sentences over three years.

* A small number of serious, but particularly technical and lengthy, fraud and financial cases may be heard by judge alone in the crown court, subject to certain requirements and at the discretion of the court.

What emerges from the interview, it seems to me, is that there is still a lot left to play for.

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Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, violated security protocols and endangered troops by using a personal device to share sensitive operational details on the unclassified messaging app Signal, according to reports in the US media of a forthcoming finding.

Meanwhile, Hegseth is apparently trying to distance himself from allegations that he ordered a second military strike on a boat carrying drug smugglers in the Caribbean, unlawfully killing two survivors of an earlier attack.

For the past three months, US forces have been targeting small boats thought to be ferrying narcotics to countries in Latin America — from which they could reach the United States. More than 80 drug smugglers are said to have been killed when their vessels were hit by US missiles.

Where does this leave Hegseth and the naval commander responsible for the operation, Admiral Frank Bradley? Are they responsible for breaches of international humanitarian law? Could they be charged with murder? And what effect has the incident had on relations between the US and the UK?

These are among the questions I put yesterday to John Bellinger, former legal adviser to the US State Department during the George W Bush administration and now a senior fellow in international law at the US Council on Foreign Relations. We met to record the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks during his visit to London.

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Brexit has had an impact on everyone who holds a British passport but on none more so than those UK citizens who worked for the European Union and found themselves out of a job after the United Kingdom left the EU in 2020.

It was therefore gratifying to see Middle Temple paying tribute to two senior members who had served in the EU courts by commissioning a painting of them. As you can see, it’s a custom that the inns of court have been following for centuries. This double-portrait is by Fiona Graham-Mackay.

At a brief ceremony on Tuesday, Dame Eleanor Sharpston DCMG KC, who served as an advocate general at the Court of Justice for almost 15 years, and Ian Forrester KC, a former judge of the EU’s General Court, were introduced by Lady Justice Thirlwall, this year’s treasurer of Middle Temple.

To listen to the brief speeches and see the painting being unveiled, just click the ► symbol on the image above. To watch in full-screen — which I recommend — click on the image and then click the appropriate symbol.

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What is property? It seems a simple enough question. I own my clothes. But do I own my body, my ideas, my country? If I own my bicycle and it’s stolen, can I get it back by cutting the chain that the thief has used to secure it? My personal data may be better protected than my bicycle — but do I own it? And what about natural resources? Does anyone own them? Can private ownership bring public benefits? Are there limits on what we should own?

These are among the profound questions that Professor Dame Sarah Worthington DBE, KC (Hon), FBA addressed in her Hamlyn lectures, delivered earlier this month. I asked her for some answers yesterday when we recorded this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks.

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The rule of law must be protected against further erosion, an all-party parliamentary committee warns us today. Failure to do so, says the House of Lords constitution committee, risks the rise of extremist political parties, ultimately creating space for dictatorship. I was one of many who gave oral evidence.

My analysis of the committee’s report— called The rule of law: holding the line against anarchy and tyranny — will appear in tomorrow’s Law Society Gazette.

For today’s episode of A Lawyer Talks, though, I interviewed the committee’s chair, Lord Strathclyde (pictured), at the House of Lords. The chimes you’ll hear in the background, I should explain, are not those of Big Ben; it’s the ubiquitous House of Lords annunciator system.

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CoCounsel is the name given by the content and technology company Thomson Reuters to its artificial intelligence assistant for legal professionals. But Pablo Arredondo, who developed its precursor with his colleague Jake Heller and then sold it to Thomson Reuters for $650m, is not so sure about the choice of name now. And while he fizzes with excitement at finding what AI can do, he is more aware than most of its limitations.

Arredondo, who’s vice-president, CoCounsel, at Thomson Reuters, has a unique perspective as a successful lawyer and an award-winning technology developer. He spoke to me from California for the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks.

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Hugh Mercer KC has sat as the UK judge at the European Court of Human Rights for little more than a month. But there will be a general election in less than four years’ time and two major political parties are seeking to have Judge Mercer kicked off the court before he completes his nine-year term of office. Does he still think applying for the post was a good career move?

That was one of the questions I asked him last week when we met to record the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. It was no surprise to find that Mercer thinks the UK should remain signed up to the human rights convention — which celebrates its 75th anniversary tomorrow — but some of his reasons were not what I had expected.

We also discussed a claim in May by nine Council of Europe members, led by Italy and Denmark, that his court’s rulings had made it too difficult for them to deal with what they described as irregular migration. To what extent could the judges take account of the mood among European nations when deciding cases of this sort?

Being the most junior member of the 46-judge court, Mercer was naturally cautious. But as someone who was on the other side of the bench until recently, his response was particularly interesting.

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Democracy is under challenge in the west, a former president of the Supreme Court told me this week. Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, who was the UK’s most senior judge from 2012 to 2017, said the level of disappointment in governments — almost across the Western world — seemed to be pervasive and increasing. People were turning to populist alternatives and, he added, populism tends not to respect the rule of law.

Neuberger (pictured) gave me a wide-ranging interview ahead of a lecture he is delivering at the Old Bailey tonight to mark the launch of a series of events called Justice for All. He will be considering the rule of law and its place in a fair and functional society.

“Improving the rule of law ultimately comes down to political will and the appointment of strong ministers with real commitment and experience,” he says in his lecture. How, I wondered, could we encourage ministers to do what was right? That, he replied, was a very good question.

You can hear how Neuberger tackled it in the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. My weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol above.

A former diplomat who served at the British embassy in Beijing has cast doubt on what’s thought to have been a major allegation in the failed prosecution case against two men who were accused of spying for China.

Professor Kerry Brown, a leading sinologist who would have been called as a defence expert if charges against Chris Berry and Chris Cash had not been dropped, thought it was entirely implausible that Cai Qi, a member of the standing committee of the Chinese Communist Party politburo, had arranged to meet Berry at a restaurant in eastern China and then been kept waiting for 40 minutes because of traffic delays.

Brown was speaking to Ken Macdonald (pictured) and Tim Owen for an episode of their Double Jeopardy podcast released yesterday. The two KCs suggested that Brown’s expert report, disclosed to the Crown Prosecution Service shortly before the trial had been due to open, might have persuaded the director of public prosecutions to drop the case.

But, as Macdonald told me yesterday, that theory raises more questions than it answers. In an interview for A Lawyer Talks, I asked the former prosecutor about implications of Double Jeopardy’s double scoop.

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“Politically motivated attacks on the legal profession are irresponsible and dangerous,” representatives of all 250,000 lawyers in the United Kingdom said this week. These attacks, they added, “weaken public trust and confidence in the rule of law and erode the very foundations of justice that underpin fairness and democracy”.

In a joint statement, the Bar Council, the Law Society, the Law Society of Scotland, the Faculty of Advocates, the Bar of Northern Ireland and the Law Society of Northern Ireland said:

Barristers, solicitors and judges have been subjected to violence, death threats and rape threats. Some have faced threats to their family members. We have repeatedly seen law firms and offices be set upon by protestors. We are deeply disturbed by this rising tide of intimidation targeting those who serve our justice system and uphold democratic principles.

Lawyers should never suffer adverse consequences because they are identified with their clients or their clients’ causes. Lawyers are not their clients. Those who are unpopular or despised are still entitled to access the courts just as much as anyone else. Nobody is above the law, including politicians. Nobody is beneath the law’s protections.

As the statement acknowledges, it’s not just the lawyers who have come under attack in the past couple of weeks. Judges are particularly vulnerable to ill-informed criticism from those seeking political advantage.

For a unique perspective on the challenges now facing the judiciary I spoke yesterday to Professor Sir Ross Cranston, the only person alive to to have served in the legislature, the executive and the full-time senior judiciary of England and Wales.

In a wide-ranging interview for A Lawyer Talks, Cranston discussed the themes of his new book, Judging, published this month by Oxford University Press. He made the case for a new offence of traducing the judiciary, which could be committed by those who make false allegations of corruption against judges online.

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The Department for Business and Trade is currently reviewing the opt-out collective actions regime in competition law, a legal structure that enables consumers to claim compensation from corporations that are accused of abusing a dominant position in the marketplace. A recent example was the claim brought against Mastercard on behalf of up to 44 million consumers by the lawyer Walter Merricks, who discussed the outcome with me on A Lawyer Talks in May.

Launching a consultation two months ago, the government said:

We are committed to consumer protection and want to ensure that the regime has achieved, and continues to achieve, these objectives. This government is focused on economic growth; and a regime that is proportionate and focused on returns to consumers where they are due is good for growth and investment.

However, we are aware of the potential burden on business that increased exposure to litigation can present. Finding the right balance between achieving redress for consumers and limiting the burden on business is essential to ensure that businesses can operate with certainty, whilst providing a clear, cost-effective, route for consumers.

How should we calibrate the balance between corporations and consumers?

Representing the consumers’ side is the Collective Redress Lawyers Association. It wants to ensure that people harmed through anti-competitive behaviour can secure compensation through the courts.

Banging the drum for business is a group called Fair Civil Justice. It argues that collective actions in the courts should be a last resort, not the first port of call.

Most cases settle. But how much of the compensation should go to individual consumers and how much to the lawyers and the funders without whom these cases would never get off the ground?

Settling a class action originally valued at £14 billion earlier this year, Mastercard agreed to pay £200 million. But when the available balance is shared out, each consumer is expected to receive no more than £70 — and perhaps as little as £45.

On the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks, I discussed these issues with David Greene (pictured), senior partner at the law firm Edwin Coe and a co-president of the Collective Redress Lawyers Association. He offered a robust — but not unqualified — defence of the legal regime introduced 10 years ago.

My weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol above.

It would be “shame and a mistake” for the United Kingdom to leave the European convention on human rights, the UK’s former judge at the human rights court told me last week. Tim Eicke KC, who was elected to the court in 2016 for a nine-year-term, spoke to me from Essex Court Chambers, the barristers’ set to which he returned earlier this month.

As the judge “elected in respect of Northern Ireland” — plus the rest of the UK — Eicke (pictured) said he was particularly concerned about the effect that withdrawal from the convention would have on the Belfast Good Friday agreement.

He also referred to a report this month from the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, which examined how the human rights convention has been covered in the UK. According to the report — but contrary to the impression given by some media outlets — the human rights court had found against the UK in only 13 removal cases since 1980, just four of which concerned family life.

In a wide-ranging interview for A Lawyer Talks, we discussed the government’s plans to limit the application of article 8 of the convention with the aim of deporting more illegal migrants. I also wanted to know why Eicke had applied for the Strasbourg job in the first place and the constraints it had imposed on his return to practice. And he explained why human rights judges from across Europe took such a close interest in the UK.

My regular podcast series is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Non-subscribers can savour a taster by clicking the ► symbol above.

Think of an international court that can stop foreign manufacturers selling pirated copies of British inventions in the UK. It’s a court whose proceedings are largely conducted in English and where UK lawyers abound.

This is a court whose use of English legal principles has contributed to its success since it opened for business a couple of years ago. But its caselaw must do without the insights of British judges because the United Kingdom is not one of its 18 members. That leaves Britain as the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle, according to my guest on this week’s podcast.

Rob Jackson, pictured at his office in the City of London, is a patent attorney and a partner in the intellectual property firm Dehns. The court he’s referring to is the Unified Patent Court.

Why did the UK withdraw from the agreement setting up the court? Should we try to re-join? Could they let us in? How much of an advantage would that be to British businesses?

Those are among the questions I asked Jackson in the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. My regular podcast series is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Non-subscribers can savour a taster by clicking the ► symbol above.