Resumen de City's status faces multiple threats

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  Leader Andrew Mitchell is a man best remembered by the public for having told a policeman he was a pleb. It's best remembered by litigators, though, for Mitchell's lawyers missing a deadline.

  And that, says Richard Vary, head of litigation at Nokia, is the sign of something very worrying. Vary was our chair at The Lawyer's Managing Risk and Mitigating Litigation conference last week, which saw 80 in-house heads of legal in a room with regulators, prosecuting authorities and leading private practice litigators. Vary, who sits part time as a judge, can see the litigation system from two sides, and his closing remarks were a call to arms. The Woolf reforms were supposed to unify procedure, but over the last 15 years each court has evolved whole sets of specialist rules. The White Book is now a bigger volume than all of Finland's laws.