Being held over a barrel

It is fairly common, when buying or selling a pub, to have a simultaneous exchange (of contracts) and completion. Partly this is because the parties’ preferred completion date is too soon to allow for all the pre-contract work to be finished a couple of weeks before the completion date – as a result, the parties often book removal arrangements, etc, on trust. This trust can be...
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Identity theft

Boys & Maughan’s tips to combat ID theft are a useful, if on the whole common sense, reminder of how to avoid ID theft. One point that I had not recognised before is that company directors’ full names, home addresses (usually) and signatures (often) are available from Companies House. In addition, as it happens, so are their dates of birth – useful material for a...
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The price of justice

In the Guardian today, Marcel Berlins is delighted with the Jackson Report, expecting it to drive down legal costs – of civil litigation, anyway. Maybe it will, but I think he is unfair on lawyers.OK: legal costs are high; I don’t dispute that. However, to say they are disproportionate is, often, unfair. However small the claim, the lawyer running (or defending) it is expected to be...
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Three strikes and you’re out – daft!

How can the government think it is fair, proportionate, feasible or right to terminate a household's Internet connection because someone using it is accused of breach of copyright?Quite apart from the weakness of the evidence and the risk that the transgressor is piggy-backing on someone else's insecure wireless network, terminating an entire household's connection is unfair on any...
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Do lawyers milk it?

“An exact legal opinion on a claim could vary, depending on how expensive your lawyer is” – I read this recently (cannot now remember where) and thought, “How true!” Whatever the merits of a case, there will always be a lawyer willing to argue it – for a fee, of course.In a number of cases, this seems to be just to make money or because the client insists. Two...
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An improving market?

It may be too early to tell for sure, but there are indications that there is more movement in the pub market than over the past few months: I am currently handling 4 leasehold pub sales and one freehold pub purchase, all of which were “stalled” before Christmas, but which are now leaping forward I hope this is a sign of better times to come – though the leasehold sale prices...
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