The News of the World saga continues, with an announcement that Lord Justice Leveson will conduct the hacking inquiry in the Royal Courts of Justice.

More reliable than Boris Johnson’s Brexit timetable, our weekly round-up of the commercial news stories you need to know about can help you to improve your commercial awareness and keep up to date with the business world. 

A report by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has argued that the UK legal market should address its over-capacity by cutting 5% of solicitor jobs.

Herbert Smith Freehills and Travers Smith have joined Discuss, a social mobility programme run by the diversity specialists, Rare Recruitment.

Specialist diversity recruitment company Rare's Articles programme has won the Race for Opportunity Future Workforce Award 2013, facing down stiff competition from big-name organisations such as Sky and Microsoft.

Last year LawCareers.Net reported that 17  law firms had joined the pledge to combat career obstacles faced by minority ethnic lawyers, in partnership with Rare Recruitment. 

Magic circle giant Allen & Overy has joined top-end firms Clifford Chance, Hogan Lovells, Herbert Smith and Travers Smith in signing up to a specialist agency which actively recruits high-achieving African Caribbean graduates.

This LCN Feature outlines some practical and emotional steps law firms can take to support Muslim employees during this period.

What’s debt refinancing and why do businesses use it?

It’s A-level results day and as thousands of students across the country find out where they are going to study at university, we urge all incoming law students to head to our first-year zone for more information on what to do at this stage. Meanwhile, we’ve summarised a collection of interesting and relevant commercial news stories below.

Disparity in the justice system between outcomes for defendants who are BAME and defendants who are white is being compounded by a lack of data needed to analyse the problem, The Centre for Justice Foundation has reported. 

We spoke to Rachel Hii, a future trainee who’s taken and passed the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) having completed a preparation course with The University of Law. Find out how Rachel found the SQE prep, the assessments themselves and Rachel's top tips for you!

Quotas are needed to address the overwhelming and continuing male dominance of legal, political, media and arts roles, the Fawcett Society has said.

Law firms need to introduce quotas to make the representation of women at partner and management level more equal after “years of talking” about diversity have failed to effect real change, the founder of The First 100 Years project has said.