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Practice Wire editorial team
Newsroom Desk is the shared byline for reporting written and edited by the Practice Wire editorial team. We use it for news written from primary sources — regulator consultations and decisions, company filings, published research, court judgments and firm announcements — where the story is the reporting rather than one writer's analysis.
Every Newsroom Desk story is checked against the original source before it publishes, and links to that source so readers can verify it. Where a story is corrected or updated after publication, we note the change at the foot of the article.
Elevate's purchase of legal project management platform Lupl points to a shift in law firm software: once AI is doing more of the drafting and review, the valu…
Newsroom Desk
Practice Wire
The SRA-focused consultancy founded by former senior regulator Crispin Passmore and Juliet Oliver has added former FCA figure Alex Roy to lead a new financial…
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Practice Wire
New research suggests most professional firm leaders expect AI to reshape junior roles. For law firms, that raises a practical question: if the trainee solicit…
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Practice Wire
The private equity-backed consolidator has completed a refinancing that gives it long-term funding for further strategic acquisitions and continued investment…
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Practice Wire
Leading law firm advisers have told the Solicitors Regulation Authority that requiring notification of mergers and acquisitions at heads of terms would be unwo…
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Practice Wire
Most large law firms are now using AI in some form, but new research shows 85% of their lawyers worry about relying on inaccurate or fabricated output. The con…
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Practice Wire
The latest SRA statistics show record numbers of solicitors in England and Wales, yet the number of regulated firms has slipped below 9,000. The picture is not…
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Practice Wire
The Law Society backs earlier risk detection but says a rule letting the SRA prescribe notifiable events whenever it chooses is a wide enabling power with thin…
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Practice Wire
The Association of Costs Lawyers has called for lower-value solicitor-client costs disputes to be handled through a specialist online portal rather than the Le…
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Practice Wire
The oversight regulator has signed off rules separating compliance officer roles from managers who can act alone, with a phased rollout from January 2027 and a…
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Practice Wire
The 2025/26 reporting season shows most large UK law firms growing revenue again — yet the spread between the fastest risers and the flat performers is the rea…
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Practice Wire
Knights is paying £27m for Moore Barlow's commercial and private wealth practices, while Fletchers absorbs the personal injury, clinical negligence and Court o…
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Practice Wire
Sir Geoffrey Vos told an Australian audience that cost and speed will push the public towards machine-enabled resolution of low-value disputes, and warned the…
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Practice Wire
New SRA diversity data shows women hold the majority of solicitor roles in law firms but a minority of the ownership. The recruitment problem is solved; the pr…
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Practice Wire
Fixed fees now account for more matters than hourly billing in one major UK survey, and one litigation firm says 69% of its income came from alternative fundin…
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Practice Wire
AI is very good at exactly the tasks trainees and paralegals cut their teeth on. Strip those hours out and firms still have to build senior lawyers - just with…
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Practice Wire
More than 1,100 firms have left the SRA-regulated population since 2020, yet UK legal services revenue passed GBP 55bn and fee income growth hit a 15-year high…
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Practice Wire
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has logged dozens of reports of AI misuse in a single year and issued a warning notice on hallucinated citations, supervisi…
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Practice Wire
CEDR co-founder Dr Karl Mackie CBE — dubbed 'Mr Mediation' — has died aged 79, leaving a dispute resolution profession he helped build from scratch.
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Practice Wire
The listed consolidator will fold 30 fee earners into its Reading base, closing two offices as its buy-and-build run through the south east continues.
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Practice Wire
Clients are arriving at first appointments with detailed AI-generated legal positions. Lawyers are increasingly being asked to review, verify and sometimes und…
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Practice Wire
New research suggests in-house legal teams are adopting AI faster than the firms advising them, and some clients are already rethinking who they instruct.
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Practice Wire
Gen Z lawyers are already inside the profession as trainees, paralegals and associates. The practice management question is whether traditional ways of supervi…
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Practice Wire
Oak Legal Group has bought Hertfordshire practice Perrin Myddelton weeks after its Oxford deal, pitching itself at firms wrestling with law firm succession pla…
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Practice Wire
Amicable, built to guide couples through separation without lawyers on both sides, is seeking authorisation from the SRA — conceding that some cases genuinely…
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Practice Wire
Russell-Cooke and Teacher Stern, neighbours on the same central London street, have confirmed they will not combine — a reminder of how often law firm merger c…
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Practice Wire
Resolution has pushed back hard on claims that giving cohabiting couples legal protection amounts to marriage by stealth, or that it would flood the family cou…
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Practice Wire