Lecturing for CLT

As some of you will know, today I was speaking at the CLT 12th Annual Residential Landlord & Tenant Update. The great thing about speaking at one of these events is that there are eight other brilliant speakers to listen to (and I get CPD).

The day started with an interesting overview of recent developments from Rafael Runco, the Deputy Housing Ombudsman,. There was then an excellent presentation on HMOs and the HHSRS from David Smith of Pain Smith Solicitors (and landlords looking for help in these areas could do a lot worse than instruct his firm, one of the few who have real expertise in this area). I also enjoyed the talk from Tracey Bloom on possession orders and the problems with suspended orders and tolerated trespassers.

In the afternoon we had a great talk from Professor Martin Partington, who some of you may remember was responsible for overseeing part of the Law Commissions housing law reform program. This was followed by a fascinating talk from Sue Highmore, formerly of Linklaters and now a freelance writer and trainer, on the new Equality Bill which is currently going through Parliament. The day finished with talks from Professor James Driscoll, and Siobhan McGrath, Senior President of the Residential Property Tribunal (which I was not able to stay for).

The main 'new' thing I learned on the day is that the government is likely to increase the rent limit for assured shorthold tenancies from £25,000 to £100.000, probably with effect from April 2010. Which will of course bring many more properties into the ambit of the tenancy deposit regulations. But I will write more about this if it is confirmed.

But a good day all round and I now have lots of notes and new information which can form the subject matter of new blog posts (unless I can persuade the speakers to write the posts themselves as a guest blogger!).

Becoming a lawyer

Like many people I suspect, I was concerned to read the recent BBC report about glass ceilings which, the report said, means that "top professions such as medicine and law are increasingly being closed off to all but the most affluent families”

However I am not sure I entirely agree with that. I don’t know about medicine but so far as becoming a solicitor is concerned (I am not going to talk about barristers), it is not necessary to travel in a line from Eton to Oxbridge to Linklaters. There are alternative routes.

The traditional route
The process of becoming a solicitor is described on the Solicitors Regulation Authority web-site here. There are three stages:

The Academic stage (normally a law degree, but there is a conversion course for non law graduates)

The Legal Practice course. This is offered by the College of Law and various Universities (generally former polytechnics) and colleges, and

A training contract (previously called ‘articles’) normally with a firm of solicitors.

1. So far as stage 1 is concerned, if you cannot afford to go to University, you can study for the London External Law Degree. I studied for this many years ago (as I could not afford to pay for the conversion course from my Geography degree) - it took me five years. It was a tough five years but also enjoyable in many ways. You can only really do an external degree in this way if you actually like the subject (which I did).

For the first part of this time I worked as a legal secretary, for the final two years I worked as what we now call a paralegal but which then was called a solicitors clerk (i.e. someone without a legal qualification doing fee earning work in a solicitors office). Although I disliked the secretarial experience, it has actually proved invaluable for me, so my chequered route to becoming a solicitor was after all a Good Thing.

2. As regards the legal practice course, you can also now do this part time. Many of the colleges offer this, allowing you to study in the evenings or at weekends. If you have worked or are working in a solicitors office doing legal work (as I did) you should find this course fairly straightforward, as much of it will be familiar to you from your job.

3. The training contract is often the most difficult part of the journey, as you have to persuade a firm to take you on. However you should manage this (eventually) if you can show that you are able, and willing to work hard. You can also get a training contract with legal departments in local authorities and some other large firms such as the utilities. It has to be said though that some people find it very hard indeed to get a training contract. Which is very unfair. Although if you hang on in there and keep trying there is always hope. The solicitor who started the Nearly Legal web-site was in this position when he started blogging (hence the name), and he is now a qualified solicitor in a good London firm.

The Ilex route
There is however another route to becoming a solicitor, which is not always realised. This is via The Institute of Legal Executives, also known as Ilex. Here people, usually (although not necessarily) support staff at legal firms, study part time for their Ilex exams, which will eventually qualify them as a Legal Executive Lawyer. This is excellent for those who cannot afford to take time off or pay the fees to study full time.

Legal Executive lawyers have many of the rights formerly reserved for solicitors, for example legal executive advocates have right of audience in the County Court and Magistrates Courts, and although most work within solicitors firms, they can practice on a self employed basis.

A couple of years after qualifying as an Ilex Fellow, they can then go on to become a solicitor, generally without having to do a training contract, although I believe they still have to do the legal practice course. The Ilex site is rather vague about this and implies that the rights now available to Ilex Fellows now make this unnecessary.

One of my best friends started out as a legal secretary, qualified with Ilex, become a solicitor, and then went on to become a partner in her firm, so anything is possible if you want it badly and are prepared to work hard.

Don’t give up before you start
If you are not from a moneyed family with contacts in the legal profession, it will be harder for you to qualify. Life is not fair. However if you are of reasonable intelligence and willing to work hard, you should manage it. I did.

The main barrier I would say is one of intelligence rather than money. When I started my external law degree, there were many people in the class who never made it to the second stage because they simply could not pass the exams. You have to be able to analyse in a legal way. That is one of the main skills that you learn through the legal education process, it reprograms your brain to think differently. If you can do this, it will help you get on in life generally, even if you never make it to becoming a qualified lawyer.

But before you start
I would suggest that all thinking of a career in the law, should first read Professor Richard Susskinds book, The End of Lawyers? which I discussed in my blog item here. This will prepare you for the future in the legal profession, which long term is unlikely to be much like the past, for most of us.

Letting agents - instead of renewal fees

Note - the Landlord Law Blog has now moved to www.landlordlawblog.co.uk.

I was a bit shocked, although I suppose not entirely surprised, to read in the excellent 4wallsandaceiling property tribes forum about what some greedy letting agents are doing to replace the renewal commission they are going to lose as a result of the decision in the OFT v. Foxtons case.

They are contacting tenants and persuading them to leave at the end of the fixed term, so they can earn commission on finding a new tenant for the landlord.

In fact they will be gaining twice from this manouvre, as they will presumably get commission from the landlord of the property the tenants are moving too also, having done little work for it.

The agents on the 4walls forum (who don't do this) ask whether this practice is legal. The answer is no. This is probably a good time to take a look at the law of agency, which most people have either forgotten or think does not exist.

Trotting over to the bookcase to get out my book on agency law, I find this rather good quotation from a Judge in an agency case:

"The position of principal and agent give rise to particular and onerous duties on the part of the agent, and the high standard of conduct required from him springs from the fiduciary relationship between his employer and himself. His position is confidential. It readily lends itself to abuse. A strict and salutary rule is required to meet the special situation."

The fiducuary duty is an important one. I have sourced a nice definition from Gillhams Solicitors LLP which you can read here. Agents would do well to study it.

Under agency law there are a number of principles and rules, which are in essence as follows:

• The agent must perform his contractual duties, and follow his principals (ie the landlord's) instructions
  
• He must do this with 'due care and skill' appropriate to the type of work he is doing
  
• He must not delegate his duty (without the principals consent)
  
• He must not put himself in a position where his duties to the principal conflict with his own interests
  
• He must not take bribes
  
• He must not take advantage of his position or his principals property in order to obtain a benefit for himself, and
  
• He has a duty to account (ie he must keep his principals money separate from his own, and hand it over, together with all relevant documents and accounts when asked)

I am sure many landlords will smile ruefully on reading this, their experience having been quite different. From what I hear about many agents (not all of them), they seem to have no idea that they are acting in a fiduciary capacity and appear to be acting in their own interests only.

So what can a landlord do if he finds that his agent has acted against his interests, and persuaded his tenant to leave so he (the agent) can earn a new commission finding a replacement? Well I would that thought that, as this is a clear breach of the agent's fiduciary duty, the landlord can go to court and claim both a refund the commission received by the agent for re-letting the his property, and the commission received by the agent respect of the property to which the tenant moved, along with a refund of all expenses incurred by him as a result of the tenant vacating.

It might be an idea, if a clear example of this practice is found, for a test case to be brought (possibly funded by one of the landlords associations??), so these agents are made aware of their responsibilities.

NLA publishes merger court order

Note - the Landlord Law Blog has now moved to www.landlordlawblog.co.uk.

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Having been alerted by a twitter posting by the National Landlords Association (NLA) stating that their web-site page on the merger between the NLA and the National Federation of Residential Landlords/Southern Private Landlords Association had been updated, I was intrigued to see that they have published the court order online. Being a lawyer I naturally downloaded this immediately. You can see it here.

It is an interesting document. Not only does it make it absolutely clear that the case has been dismissed in its entirety, it also gives an indication of the level of cost of this litigation to the claimants.

For example clause 7 states that costs are to be paid on an indemnity basis. This means that when assessing the costs bill, the court will be more generous to the defendants than they would normally. Courts only award costs on an indemnity basis if they consider that the losing party's case was singularly undeserving.

In addition, specific awards on account of costs were made of £85,000 to the NLA and £45,000 to the other defendants by 5 June.

FInally, the order specified that the claimants must destroy an electronic database (presumably of membership) provided to them by the NLA under a previous court order, together with all copies. This part of the order was backed up by a penal notice. So if the claimants are found not to have done this, they are liable to be imprisoned, fined, or have their assets seized.

Blimey! A strong order then. It just goes to show that litigation should not be undertaken lightly. If you lose, it can be very expensive.

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The Law Bazaar

If you are looking for a lawyer, there is a new option available now. This is the Law Bazaar (reported by the Guardian here). Set up by solicitor Costas Andrea, fed up with the huge sums made by claims companies just for referring work to solicitors, this allows clients and lawyers to make contact direct.

Lawyers and clients (from any country - it is an international site) can both register on the site free of charge. Both appear as anonymous, although lawyers are rated on the basis of client feedback. Clients can load up details of their case and then lawyers and client can discuss the case before the client chooses a firm to act. At that stage the lawyer pays a modest fee to the site (£50 or £150 for PI cases).

As it is free of charge, all lawyers should register. There is nothing to lose and they may gain some lucrative work.

Susskind - the end of lawyers?

I have just listened to an interesting webcast of an interview of Richard Susskind here. Susskind is promoting his new book, The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the nature of legal services, having written several groundbreaking books on the use of IT and technology in the internet in the past.

Susskind covers quite a wide range of legal IT related topics in the interview, but it is some of the comments at the end which are most worrying (for lawyers). Both he and his interviewer make the point that lawyers are not (on the whole) natural innovators and tend to be resistant to new developments, particularly if they are making a good income as they are.

However he believes (and I have to say that I agree with him) that technology and the internet will have huge implications for the profession, and it is worrying that the Law Society and the government are planning new rules and regulations for the future of the profession, without really taking these properly into account.

For example one thing he mentioned was shared knowledge on forums and how this may develop in the future. In fact however this is happening right now, as there are a number of consumer forums where people exchange information about legal matters, for example this forum here on tenancy deposits. Shared knowledge of this kind could well reduce the need to use qualified lawyers in the future.

The conclusion, more or less, was that there will always be a place for some lawyers and the subject is an interesting discipline in itself, but that the profession has probably passed its high point and things will never be the same again. He also made the point that new lawyers are entering an uncertain profession and many law students should be prepared to use their law degree for something other than practising as a lawyer.

Advice for landlords whose tenants are not paying rent

Note - the Landlord Law Blog has now moved to www.landlordlawblog.co.uk.

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A report on the BBC web-site today states that more tenants are in arrears of rent now than since the late 1980's. Which is not surprising given the almost daily announcements of redundancies.

Here is a bit of advice for landlords:

• Keep on top of things and contact tenants as soon as they fall into arrears
  
• Be sympathetic to tenants who respond to you, and consider reducing the rent if they are geninely in financial difficulties through no fault of their own
  
• If tenants are on housing benefit/Local Housing Allowance, tell the benefit office - they should make payment direct to you if the arrears reach 8 weeks
  
• However if tenants have not responded when the arrears reach 2 months worth, serve a section 8 notice and consider issuing proceedings for possession. Remember possession proceedings can take months.

For more information see my article 'Dealing with rent arrears - some different approaches' which you can download and read free of charge in this section of my LandlordLaw web-site.

Further guidance and help is available in my Rent Arrears Action Plan.

Increased use of set-off by banks

Note - the Landlord Law Blog has now moved to www.landlordlawblog.co.uk.

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I am obliged to Sally Chicken to referring me to a blog entry by Martin Lewis of moneysavingexpert.com on banks right of set off. It seems that the banks have the power to transfer money from savings accounts (if they are held by the same organisation) to pay off money due to them by the account holder elsewhere, for example for credit cards or loans. The bank is unlikely to let you know that they are going to do this, to prevent you from moving the money, so it could hit you at any time (although banks are unlikely to do this save as a last resort). However sudden unexpected transfers can cause enormous trouble for the account holder.

It looks as if banks are now doing this more, the Citizens Advice Bureau apparently have seen a 25% increase in this happening.

Probably the answer is to make sure that you keep your savings entirely separately from your main accounts. Although as so many banks and building societies own each other nowadays this may be easier said than done. If you are not sure about this, consider using a Credit Union.

Mr Lewis also points out that if the transfer results in cheques or other payments not being met, this could result in your incurring bank charges (i.e. the bank who caused the problem might be profiting from it!). Which is very unfair. Maybe if this happens to you, a complaint could be made to the Office of Fair Trading?

You can read Martin Lewis’ blog item in full here.

Student lettings - new agreements on Landlord-Law

I am just finishing a fairly long running project (about 2 months) to develop some new special tenancy agreements for student lets, for my Landlord-Law site.

Developed initially in response to a query from one of my members on the discussion forum, they are designed to deal with two particular problems with student lets:

• The fact that they are generally signed when the previous tenants are still in occupation (which could potentially cause major problems if they refused to move out, as legally they are entitled to do), and
  
• The fact that landlords will want to let the property for the whole year, but many students will not want to live there over the summer.

It was initially just going to be one agreement. However when I put it out to consultation with the membership, some of them wanted one part and others wanted another, and some said that they would definitely not want that part, so in the end I decided to do a number of different agreements using different combinations.

Then another member sent me his standard agreement for out of season holiday lets so I thought that perhaps I would do one of them too.

So there will eventually be four different types, although at the time of typing this I have not yet loaded up the out of season holiday let one.

Its been a bit of a time for tenancy drafting recently. Apart from these student agreements, I have been asked by clients to do an under 18 tenant (signing jointly with her guarantor), an assured tenancy for an elderly couple renting a flat intended for the rest of their lifetime, and a memorandum for protected tenancies. Heigh Ho!

Twitter update

I wrote a blog entry about twitter when I first signed up. However on reflection perhaps this was a bit negative. Having used twitter for a couple of weeks I feel it is time to give a more positive update.

I have found it really good. I am now putting notifications of all new developments on Landlord-Law onto twitter so anyone who want to know what I am doing can follow me and find out. I know that a few people have set up twitter accounts just so they can do that, which is nice.

However I have also found some good twitter accounts to follow. The most fun must be Stephen Fry. At the time of writing he is filming in Kenya, and us twitterers following get regular updates, including pictures. However perhaps the most interesting are the news accounts – I am now subscribing to the Guardian, Law Tweets, The Times Law, the Times Property, BBC breaking news, UK Parliament and Number 10 Downing Street.

Following twitterers is also a good way of letting them know that you exist, and often they in turn follow you. So, for example, my tweets are now being followed by Stephen Fry, No 10, and the UK Parliament to name but a few. This is initially very flattering until you realise that they are also following lots of others. Stephen Fry for example is following over 7,000 so I doubt whether he reads them all or he would do nothing else!

I have particularly enjoyed the news tweets, and it is nice when my husband tells me a news item to be able to say ‘I already knew that’. Smug but true.

As a lawyer it is also very interesting to be kept informed, on a day to day basis, of what is happening in Parliament. As a result of this I may check out more the development of housing related bills and read the online information in the excellent UK Parliament web-site.

So all in all I would recommend twitter. It allows me in easy way to keep people informed of new Landlord-Law content, and keeps me up to date. A good combination.

Strutting my Stuff

I have had a few gratifying initiations to speak recently. Last month I spoke at London Landlords Day and also to the Lambeth Landlords forum, which were both very enjoyable.

This month I am due to speak to the CLT 11th Residential Landlord & Tenant Update Conference 2008 on 23 October, where I will be giving a possession proceedings update. CLT courses are always rather on the expensive side, however CLT have agreed to allow my annual members to attend this (and another conference I am doing in February) at subscriber rates, which means a discount of £100. Members can find out more about this in the Landlord-Law special offers section.

Nothing so far in November (I was invited to do the Landlord & Buy to Let Show in Birmingham, but couldn’t face the travel) but on 3 December I will be doing a presentation at the Residential Landlord and Tenant Update, organised by Professional Conferences, called Possession 'Claims For Private Landlords – A Formula For Success'. One of my co-speakers on this conference will be Jan Luba QC so I am quite excited about that. I have wanted to hear him speak for ages, but as I generally have more than enough CPD (and being a bit of a tightwad) I can never justify the cost of attending his courses.

Finally, I was really pleased to be invited to talk about Landlord-Law at the 2009 Legal IT Show on 4 February. My web designer Gill Bishop will be there with me, to answer all those tricky technical questions on things I don’t really understand. So if you are interested in how the site was developed and how it works, please do come along.

If you would like me to speak to your organisation please do get in touch. I always try to speak when invited if I can, but this is subject to my being able to travel to the venue – I live in Norwich and do not drive, so am dependent on the trains. You can find more about the talks that I can offer here.

London Landlords Day 2008

Thursday was London Landlords day – this is an annual event put on by all the local authorities in London for their landlords. It is currently run on their behalf by a company called Accession.

I was doing a talk called 'Dealing with Tenants Rent Arrears'. This is a new talk, based largely on my new(ish) Rent Arrears Action Plan section on Landlord-Law. It was just going to be about what to do when tenants fall into arrears with a short section on preventative action at the beginning, but then the organizers in their wisdom sent out a flyer saying (without consulting me first) that I was going to tell everyone how to prevent rent arrears arising in the first place! I wish! Still I decided I had better add a few more slides, so that turned into quite a largish and important part of the talk (which I am now thinking of turning into an article).

I think the talk went well. It was in the auditorium which I think seats about 400. There seemed to be quite a lot of people there for my talk, although it was difficult to see much beyond the blinding lights which shone into my eyes whenever I tried to peer out in the audience.

If you were one of those people, thank you for coming along and I hope you enjoyed it. Some of you took up my invitation to let me have your business card or email address so I could send you a pdf of the presentation. These have all been sent out, apart from a few where I could not read the handwriting. So if you have not had it, that is the reason!

I also took the opportunity (while walking to and from the station) to take a few digital photos of houses and flats in the surrounding area which, being Kensington, is posh. Eagle eyed readers of Landlord-Law have probably noticed that it is now festooned with pictures of property. I now take pictures whenever I go anywhere new, much to the irritation of my family ("come on Mum …"). There are some stunning blocks of posh flats on the Kensington side of Olympia, some of which may well be rented out, although I would surprised if any of them are ASTs (where the rent must be under £25,000). Square clips of these will gradually get onto the Landlord-Law site, hopefully giving it a bit of class, and making it a bit more representative, most of the current pictures having been taken in Norwich.

Apart from a jaunt to Lambeth in a couple of weeks to speak at their Local Authority forum, and my normal slot in the CLT October property conference in October, that is it for my speaking this year. At the moment anyway.

Tesco Law in action

A few weeks ago, I was (initially) somewhat flattered to receive an invitation from a financial organisation (who will remain unnamed) regarding the delivery of a new possession proceedings service.

"I am aware of your expertise in the field of residential landlord and tenant law" ran the letter, "and am writing to you to explore whether we can work in partnership together". Happy to know that at least one person is aware of my expertise, I rang to find out more. However after speaking to the gentleman, my interest diminished considerably, in fact down to zero. The situation was this.

The company wants to offer a cheap and cheerful possession service to the public. However as they are not a firm of solicitors they cannot (as yet) issue the proceedings themselves. They therefore need a firm of solicitors to do this for them. "We will draft all the paperwork" said my correspondent, "all you have to do is issue the proceedings and then, if necessary, instruct the bailiffs".

Sounds good? Well not really. The claims would be issued under my firms name. So if there was anything wrong with them and a negligence claim followed, it would be my professional indemnity insurance which would be on the line. Therefore I would have to check all the paperwork before issue to make sure that it was correct. So there would really be the same amount of work as if I were drafting it up myself. And they were offering to pay me £50.

When I first heard him say £50 I found it difficult to believe that I had heard him correctly. For that I would have to receive the paperwork, open a file, check it was correct, send it off to court, log the details on receipt, instruct the agent to attend the hearing, and then deal with their report. That would be for the straightforward cases where there is no defence filed. As gently as I could, I told him that it was not something I was really interested in.

I don’t know if he will find a firm prepared to work for him. I suspect not. In fact I would hope that no solicitors firm will be prepared to issue proceedings which have not been drafted by a partner or member of staff. And although the company were offering to ‘work in partnership’ I feel pretty sure that if there were any Tesco law type rule changes which allowed them to issue the claims themselves, the 'partnership' would be fairly swiftly ended.

But is this the future I ask myself? Large financial organisations mopping up all the customers and using solicitors at knock down rates, to do the grunt work? Well hopefully not in my firm.

But it would be interesting to know if any other firms have had similar approaches.

More on Equality

Following on from my previous item on the Equality website, I was interested to see this item in the Times Law section today on John Wadham who is heading up the new Equality and Human Rights Commission.

This article makes the point that the new commission not only covers areas of law formerly dealt with by three separate commissions, it also has a budget to enforce the Human Rights Act. It will be really interesting to see how that works out.

How will it affect housing law? The main area that I can see at present is defending possession claims where the defendant is being evicted for some reason connected with their disability. It will be interesting to see if this will be largely confined to the social landlords or whether it will extend to the private sector (something discussed by myself and Nearly Legal in my previous post on the Malcolm case).

Can anyone see any other potential areas of conflict?

The new Equality web-site

While doing some writing for Landlord-Law I discovered that the new Equality Web-site is live. This was set up by the Equality Act 2006 which also set up a new Equality and Human Rights Commission. This will deal with discrimination over all areas, rather than, as before, just concentrating on specific areas such as race, and disability. The act also gives the commission power to make regulations regarding other types of discrimination, such as religious belief and gender.

The three earlier commissions, The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), The Disability Rights Commission (DRC), and The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) have now been merged into this new organisation, which has a web-site at www.equalityhumanrights.com. Any attempt to reach the old web-sites will just take you here.

It is a very clear web-site. All the fussy content of the old sites is gone. Anyone searching for information about their rights will find it quite easy. There is also a section for advisors which, again, is very clear, if rather sparse.

In fact the whole site has a ‘light on content’ feel about it, perhaps because it is so new. I spotted a A-Z index at the bottom but this just lead me to a registration page. It was extremely irritating however, having registered, to be told that access was denied and that the page had been disabled! (Was it because I said I am a lawyer? Am I being discriminated against?)

Still, if you are looking for information on any sort of discrimination this is a good place to start. Although like most sites aimed at the general public it is rather light on authorities.

My talk at London Landlords Day September 2006

You may be interested to see a recording which was done of a talk I did at London Landlords Day last September on Essential Legal Points for Landlords here. Be warned that the first few minutes is the camera running before I start talking (there is a long shot of the emergency exit notice for example and quite a lot of the walls).

I am a bit in two minds about giving this link because as usual my hair looks dreadful, but I do cover quite a bit of ground, if the subject of landlord and tenant law interests you.

Landlord success in disability discrimination case

There is an interesting report in the Times on a case, Williams v Richmond Court (Swansea) Ltd (heard on 14 December 2006), on disability discrimination. The landlord was appealing against the Judge's finding against him at first instance that he discriminated against 81 year old tenant Mrs Williams who had requested he install a stair lift, as she found it difficult to use the stairs.

The Court of Appeal found that the landlords did not discriminate, as the reason they had refused to install the stair lift was not because Mrs Williams was disabled. The reasons given by them for refusing consent included, (i) that the other tenants had voted against the proposal; (ii) aesthetics; (iii) the cost of repair; (iv) inconvenience to the residents as a whole; and (v) the Disability Rights Commission code of practice made it clear that it was not under any duty to make reasonable adjustments to the premises.

The Court of Appeal said that Judges have to carry out a two-stage exercise. First, it was necessary to identify the relevant act or omission on the part of the appellant, and second, it was necessary to look to comparators to see if they were or would have been treated differently.

Here, none of the reasons given by the landlord for refusing consent related to Mrs Williams’ disability. The underlying complaint was that the they had failed to put her in a better position than that to which she was entitled by her underlease, namely by failing to take positive action and providing consent to the installation of the stair-lift.

Landlords will no doubt feel fairly pleased at this judgment. I am sorry I am unable to provide a BAILLI link but the case does not appear to have been reported there yet.

Publishing for profit

I get sent books from time to time to review for my Landlord-Law site and I recently received a copy of Regulating Conditions in the Private Rented Sector: A Practical Guide, by Caroline Hunter and Andrew Dymond from Arden Chambers published by Thomson/Sweet & Maxwell. I was quite looking forward to receiving this, as the authors are distinguished lawyers and it is an area of law which I write about quite a lot. However although it will undoubtedly be a very useful book for me which I expect I will use a lot, I am a bit disappointed.

My main gripe is that virtually half of the book is appendices, most of which are extracts from statutes. However is there really any need for statutes to be reproduced in text books any more, in this age of online legislation? Particularly since the UK Statute Law Database has been published (although admittedly it would not have been made public when this book went to press).

At £85 this is not a cheap book. It is about an inch thick and on first glance you might think, "OK, eighty five quid for an inch thick book of analysis on a new area of law from specialist counsel, that’s acceptable". But is it acceptable to be paying effectively forty pounds for a reproduction of statutes which you can get free on the internet? It would be very easy just to have a list of relevant statutes and the url of the Statute Law Database and leave it to the reader to look them up. This book is after all aimed at the professional legal market, virtually all of whom will (or should) have broadband on their desktop computers and probably also their laptops. But if the statutes were eliminated, would we still feel happy about paying eighty five pounds for a slim volume of just half an inch thick? Probably not.

The internet is changing everything. I suspect that lawyers, a deeply traditional species mostly still steeped in paperwork and pink tape, will one day wake up to fact that legal publishers are charging a fortune for something they can now get easily for free, and refuse to pay any more. However this may not be until the younger solicitors trained on computers and the internet start to make partner status.

One rule for treasury draftsmen ...

In these days of plain English and legislation against unfair and unclear terms in consumer contracts, one can’t help wishing that there was something similar which applied to statutory instruments.

I have been trying to make sense of The Disability Discrimination (Premises) Regulations 2006 but I have to say that so far I have found them almost wholly impenetrable. Of course this may be because their general literary style is so deeply boring it is difficult to work up much interest in mentally cross referencing the necessary three or four sections so you can work out what the section you are looking at is talking about.

If this sort of thing was printed in a consumer contract it would be slated by the OFT as unfair and be unenforceable. But although this is not a contract, it is relevant to consumers, as presumably not only lawyers will need to know about disability discrimination in premises. But it is drafted in such a way that most ordinary people will never be able to understand it. Even the explanatory note at the bottom is not wholly clear. Would that treasury draftsmen were subject to the same drafting rules as the rest of us!