You will be pleased, I hope, to hear that in this blog I shall largely be steering the referendum itself a wide berth; this is not because the prospect of Brexit would not impact greatly on insolvency law and practice (it undoubtedly would) but because I have already blogged on that topic in March and issued press releases on it in so far as it affects business decision making under the R3 banner, but mainly

Before I hazard any kind of answer to the above, let me first declare my interest in the #Brexit / #Bremain debate, from the perspective of an insolvency lawyer.

New insolvency fees and deposits introduced on 21 July 2016

From 21 July 2016, insolvency fees for bankruptcy and company insolvency are set to change. This is the outcome from the funding review the Insolvency Service has undertaken with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and HM Treasury and is to come into force in the shape of The Insolvency Proceedings (Fees) Order 2016 (SI 2016/692).

This blogpost was first published as an edited article in Business Magazine’s June 2016 edition (available here).

Directors at risk in the twilight zone

So-called “Creditor Portals”, and other similarly titled electronic platforms by which insolvency practitioners typically circulate any meaningful information to creditors about insolvent estates, have been a bugbear of mine ever since they were first used a little while ago. Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely applaud the attempt which they represent to minimise the amount of unnecessary paperwork circulating around the country and the savings of cost which they bring to the administration of insolvent estates where the cost of copying and posting alone would be absolutely frightening today.

In a written statement this morning from Lord Faulks QC, Minister of State for Civil Justice, the government has announced that, from April 2016, insolvency litigation will no longer be exempt from what have been abbreviated to “the LASPO reforms”.

Regular readers of my blogs over the years will know that I never pass up a chance to use a musical analogy for business problems. As an insolvency lawyer with a second calling treading the boards, my legal practice and my music frequently vie for my attention: never more so than during the Christmas season.

I am often asked “what do you do”? If I reply “a regulatory solicitor”, this inevitably elicits a blank expression from the enquirer (be that a non-lawyer or lawyer), so I go on to the more long-winded version, that I am a criminal solicitor who advises business owners and other stakeholders on how to stay on the right side of the criminal law, and defends them when they get it wrong.

It was far from a secret that a veritable smorgasbord of phased changes to insolvency law were coming in on 1 October. The legal and insolvency press has been riddled with it, and frankly the flavours were all a bit predictable. The commentators falling over themselves to ask mundane questions such as “are you ready for…?” and “what will happen now…?” are really just asking “we are really up to date on the new law, aren’t we brilliant?”; of course you are, but you’re not getting any marks for originality.

The news in January of this year that the government planned to increase the bankruptcy petition threshold to £5,000 (subject to parliamentary scrutiny) from 1 October was greeted with mixed reaction. On the one hand, it was welcomed in that the threshold of £750 which had been in place since 1986 was wildly out of date.