Clarity all year round
Posted in For Solicitors
This time last year Anglia Research gained the right to display the Plain English Campaign’s Internet Crystal Mark on our website. In this article, Carolyn Lord discusses the importance of plain English for everyone working in the legal and allied professions, and looks at the practical steps you can take to improve the documents you send to your clients.
Read moreIrish genealogy: missing records and amazing memories
Posted in Case Histories, For Relatives
In this article regional executive Kay Morgan looks at the challenge of researching Irish family history and explains why she finds it so rewarding.
Read moreForget bitcoin – think blockchain, think assets, think registries
Posted in For Solicitors
Never mind Craig Wright. A quick news search for “bitcoin” and “blockchain” reveals that the technology underlying bitcoin grabs many more headlines than the cryptocurrency itself. Already this year, the Government Office for Science has published a report on blockchain’s implications, the deputy governor of the Bank of England devoted a speech to it, and journalists have hailed it as a trust machine, asking is blockchain the most important IT invention of our age? So what is blockchain and why is it seen as the gold bullet for achieving proof of ownership?
Read moreIs the state-backed guarantee of ownership about to start shrinking?
Posted in For Solicitors
Currently, if someone suffers loss as a result of a mistake in the land register, they can claim compensation from the Land Registry. The Government acknowledges that this insurance principle is vital for stability in the property market and the economy as a whole. Its consultation paper on privatising the Land Registry insists that any change in ownership “will not affect the existence of a state guarantee to rectify mistakes”. Nevertheless, practitioners should be aware that the Law Commission has set out a range of proposals that seek to narrow the Land Registry’s indemnity.
Read moreAll in a name
Posted in Case Histories, For Relatives, For Solicitors
People change their names for a wide variety of reasons – to avoid discrimination, to escape domestic abuse, to make a clean break from their past. While their motivations are very often practical, they can occasionally be whimsical (as a great many Wayne Rooneys, Amy Winehouses and Michael Jacksons can confirm). But, if someone changes their name and subsequently dies intestate, they may have made it very difficult for anyone to trace their next of kin: the names on their birth certificate and death certificate don't match. In this article, case manager and former police inspector Graham Underwood discusses the tools and strategies he uses when a birth certificate proves hard to find, and describes a particularly difficult bona vacantia case that involved a change of name.