By Frank Maher28 June 2021
Solicitors Indemnity Fund
For the first time since 1976, solicitors and staff from practices which have closed may find from October 2022 that they have no insurance against professional liability claims.
Frank Maher
Practices which close without a successor practice must have six years’ run-off cover under the SRA Minimum Terms and Conditions. After that, the Solicitors Indemnity Fund (SIF) has provided cover. That will cease next year.
The risk is not illusory. SIF statistics published in 2016 show that approximately 10% of claims are made after six years. A recent claim in the Court of Appeal against the Halliwell Landau partnership (not a SIF case) arose from an alleged act in 2003 – a year before the firm had converted to an LLP which collapsed into administration in 2010.
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Christopher Gosden, director of the Institute of Archaeology (Oxford)
Oxford professor Christopher Gosden has been awarded £1 million after his mother left much of her wealth to her partner in her will.
Gosden, the director of the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford, sued after being disinherited in the will left by his late mother Jean Weddell, a pioneering former medic and World Health Organisation lecturer who died in 2013 aged 84.
Gosden was angered to discover that despite his mother once vowing to leave him her London home, she instead left much of her wealth to barrister Wendy Cook, her civil partner.
The professor later discovered that the home had been sold for £710,000 without his knowledge in 2010,
An Oxford University don who sued after his mother fell for a female lawyer half her age and disinherited him has been handed a payout of almost £1million.
Archaeology Professor Christopher Gosden said Dr Jean Weddell had vowed in 2003 to leave him her London home, but he was left with nothing when she died in 2013.
It was after she fell in love with Wendy Cook, a barrister 37 years her junior, and formed a civil partnership in 2007 aged 78.
By the time she died in 2013, she had made a new will, handing nothing to her son, but leaving much of her estate to her new partner.