ContractStore Legal Business Blog

For the last couple of years I have designed a mousemat with a calendar and ruler on it, as a ContractStore Christmas present for, let’s say, 300 of our closest friends. We still have some left for 2008 so if you email

When age discrimination was banned a couple of years ago, it was still OK to have a retirement age of 65 for employees but this did not apply to partnerships. So partners and their legal advisers were unclear how to deal with the issue – might it be necessary to let partners stay on till they dropped?

Now an employment tribunal has looked at the problem and decided it can be acceptable to have a compulsory retirement age of 65 for partners

The OFT (Office of Fair Trading) has applied to the court for a ruling in respect of unauthorised overdraft charges.

Last week we visited the London Youth Support Trust to deliver 300 CDs donated to LYST, to benefit the young entrepreneurs in the scheme. LYST is strongly supported by the High Sheriff of London Jan Pethick, who attended the presentation, and the Speaker of Hackney, Councillor Faizullah Khan, came by in -between some citizenship ceremonies. He met jeweller Cathrine Bysheim who is one of the young entrepreneurs in LYST’s Hackney centre. We also met several other of the people in the scheme. It was really inspiring to see the work being done there.

Those of you who are not going to get your tax paid on time (and remember 31 January is the deadline for many of us)

Welcome to 2008. Almost all economic forecasts for the coming year are pretty grim, with oil and food prices set to rise, the credit crunch to continue and house prices falling.