Connor Beaton

When Rob McDwyer describes moving to Australia as a Dublin solicitor with just over a decade of experience under his belt, he manages to make a career-defining move sound like something of a whim. Encouraged by a handful of friends and acquaintances to follow them in making the leap, he decided to a

Strike action could be on the cards after The Bar of Northern Ireland said it is considering "an extended range of options" in response to unprecedented delays in legal aid payments. The Lady Chief Justice, Dame Siobhan Keegan, warned in her address on the opening of the new legal year earlier this

When President Higgins last month made an unprecedented political intervention in defence of Irish neutrality, Conor Gallagher must have been jumping for joy. The Irish Times correspondent's new book – Is Ireland Neutral? The Many Myths of Irish Neutrality – could not have been better ti

It was never supposed to come to this. The Bar Council's historic decision to call for strike action over fee restoration is undoubtedly a dramatic development — and one that Irish Legal News believes is entirely justified. Successive governments have had long enough to rectify an abysmal situ

Helen McEntee has pledged her support for fee restoration in a well-received speech to barristers — saying she does not "want to see a situation where barristers feel the need to protest on the steps of the Criminal Courts of Justice". Speaking for the first time at The Bar of Ireland's annual

Ireland's new mass surveillance regime is "certain" to be challenged in the European courts, a leading digital rights expert has said after the government confirmed it has obtained a High Court order requiring telecom providers to retain data for the next 12 months. The Communications (Retention of

The government has signalled an openness to reforming the criminal legal aid system to provide for direct payments to barristers practising in the District Court.

Women at Ireland's largest law firms are earning up to 61 per cent less than their male colleagues, figures released under Ireland's gender pay gap reporting law suggest.

James Lawless is one of the busiest backbenchers in the Dáil. The barrister and Fianna Fáil politician has chaired the Oireachtas justice committee for the past two years — a hard-working body which deals with more legislation than every other committee combined. The committee's

Around €2.5 million has been set aside in anticipation of a "significant increase in the number of judges" in the State, justice minister Helen McEntee has said. An increase in judicial numbers is likely to be a headline recommendation of the judicial planning working group headed by civil serv

Lawyer and technologist Professor Richard Susskind OBE put the cat among the pigeons at the Law Society of Northern Ireland's centenary conference when he suggested that solicitors may one day be rendered obsolete by technological advances. His keynote speech on Friday morning came after the Law Soc

As strikes grind the English courts to a halt, barristers in Ireland have talked up the case for similar action here as a minister reportedly gives consideration to long-awaited fee restoration. Members of the Bar Council last week met with Michael McGrath, the minister for public expenditure and re

Judge Síofra O'Leary, the Irish judge on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), has been tipped as the frontrunner in the election for the court's presidency. Human rights campaigners and legal experts speaking to Irish Legal News have warmly welcomed the Dublin-born judge's potenti

Lawyers must brace themselves for the advent of online courts where civil disputes are resolved "from desk to desk" without a traditional hearing in which all parties are simultaneously present, a Supreme Court judge has said. Addressing a packed room at the launch of the Corporate and Insolvency Ba

Wikipedia is influencing the decision-making of Irish judges, according to ground-breaking new research carried out by academics in the US and Ireland.