News

The Law Society of England and Wales has said courts should be allowed to recognise informal wills as an expression of people's final wishes. The society made the proposal in a submission to the Law Commission, which is currently concluding a consultation on will reform, the Law Society Gazette repo

Following successful seminars in Inverness and Aberdeen the next stop on the Terra Firm Tour Bus will be Dundee on 30th November. The first two events were well attended and feedback from both was very positive. The ‘line up’ for the Dundee event is:

An Iraqi Kurd who was refused asylum, humanitarian protection and human rights protection in the UK has had an application for leave to appeal rejected. A judge in the Court of Session ruled that there were “no errors of law” which were “strongly arguable” and therefore the application fell

The Faculty of Advocates has raised some questions about a working draft of the Contract (Formation) (Scotland) Bill which has been prepared by the Scottish Law Commission. In its response to a consultation on the draft, the Faculty said: “When reading this draft Bill as a whole, it appears to us

Scotland is to become the only part of the UK with statutory targets to tackle child poverty after the Child Poverty (Scotland) Bill was unanimously passed by the Scottish Parliament.The bill will:

Computers are being trained to solve problems by bingeing on episodes of a popular TV crime drama. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh mapped footage, script and background sounds from five seasons of Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) into a machine-readable format. The data was fed into a com

Thompsons has promoted Seonaid Brophy (pictured right) from the union accident team and Jillian Merchant (pictured below) from the firm’s employment law department to associate level. Ms Brophy joined Thompsons in 2012 after completing the Diploma. She started her traineeship in the lung disease t

The November edition of the Scottish Civil Justice Council (SCJC) newsletter is now available. Issue 12 includes information on committee work & membership, recent rules and consultations.

Police responding to reports of a fight were stunned when a "significant bulge" in the trousers of one of the feuding pair turned out to be a snake. The drunk 19-year-old was stopped by police following reports he was acting aggressively towards another man in Darmstadt, Germany.

The UK Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in a legal challenge against decisions by the Scottish Ministers to grant consents for the construction of four offshore wind farms in the North Sea. A panel of three justices refused permission to ap

Professor Adam Tomkins

Roger Connon The former head of Pinsent Masons’ Aberdeen office, Roger Connon, has taken up a new role with the firm and will focus on expanding the Vario freelance legal resource to the north east’s oil and gas sector.

A sheriff principal has said he included future loss in the calculation of the success fee in his review of the civil litigation costs regime because to exclude it would, among other things, incentivise delay. Holyrood’s Justice Committee took evidence on the Civil Litigation (Expenses and Group P

John Swinney

The Hindles team with founding director Alistair Hindle at second from left (by Stewart Attwood) Hindles, a firm of patent and trade mark attorneys that became the first specialist intellectual property (IP) firm to originate from Edinburgh since the Industrial Revolution when it was founded in 2005