Briefs

briefs

Damages for personal injury should be made uniform to save time and expense to public, corporate and private purses, David McIntosh, senior partner of solicitors Davies Arnold Cooper, told the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers. He commended the proposals of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor, aimed at preventing solicitors and barristers from abusing the present civil processes, and Lord Woolf's proposals for creating simpler procedures.

Freshfields, the London-based international law firm, topped the league table of worldwide legal advisers on privatisation, published by Privatisation International magazine, for the second consecutive year. It followed up 1994's work on transactions worth more than $23bn by acting on 74 transactions worth a total of $42bn last year.

The management buyout market is overheating and heading for a fall, according to Peter McHugh, head of corporate finance at the law firm Eversheds. Growing competition for institutional acquisitions has inflated prices to an unsustainable level, he says.

Eversheds has recruited Hamish Munro, a high-profile marketeer, from Davies Arnold Cooper. The firm expects him to use "his panache for turning legal issues into eye-catching, headline-making stories and the development of industry-sector teams" to promote the firm, particularly in an expansion drive in the West Midlands.

The international law firm Baker & McKenzie has strengthened its intellectual property practice by recruiting Eugene Arievich, a specialist in the field who is known throughout the former Soviet Union for his expertise in trade marks.