For the month of August we are helping people make their wills for €150. This fee will cover taking instructions which can be done online or in person and covers all work associated with ensuring your will is properly drafted and executed. In some circumstances this fee might not be appropriate (for assistance if you need additional taxation or legal [...]
Having reviewed a number of awards from PIAB since the introduction of the new “Personal Injuries Guidelines” (or the PIGs as one might call them) there seems to be a clear trend from the Board in misapplying the Guidelines and undervaluing injuries. Congratulatory comments from PIAB as to their stunning ability to reduce awards makes one worder if this paucity [...]
We have been a little quiet with our updates on this in the last number of months. It remains something of a mystery to us why 12 months after the hack the HSE has not informed any service users that they data may have been accessed in the course of the attack. The obligation to notify data subjects of a [...]
PLEASE NOTE that with effect from 7th March 2022 ("the relevant date"): (a) O'Dowd Solicitors has been authorised to operate, and is now operating, as a Limited Liability Partnership ("LLP"); (b) as set out in Section 123, of the Legal Services Regulation Act, 2015 (subject to the exceptions listed therein), a partner in O'Dowd Solicitors has no personal liability for [...]
Our view is that without proper representaion a claimaint is walking into a lion's den when engaging with PIAB. The system for resolving personal injuries claims in Ireland is currently broken. We would probably not have said this 24 months ago. We would have said that if your injuries were minor, if you did not have any huge loss of [...]
On the 15th May 2021 the Data Protection Officer (DPO) for the HSE made a data breach notification to the Data Protection Commission. In that notification he said that a day earlier the HSE suffered a data security breach of its IT systems. After some difficulty we have obtained the official data breach notification pursuant to the Freedom of Information [...]
Mícheál O'Dowd of our office was quoted today in Agriland, a leading news publication for agricultural matters in Ireland on the unworkable and illogical nature of the Beef Exceptional Aid Measure (BEAM) Scheme introduced in 2019 to assist drystock farmers. Over 3200 farmers are currently facing repayment demands from the Department of Agriculture, and it likely thousands more will face [...]
We realised our old Conveyancing Guide was now hopelessly out of date, so there was nothing for it only to update it for 2021. We try to be as honest as possible, don't do any hard sell, try and get you to jump through hoops, or make your life more difficult than it needs to be in any way, [...]
We note that today the office of the Irish Data Protection Commission levied a fine of €225m on Whatsapp, a messaging arm of Facebook. This was done in the context of outrage from a number of other European Data Protection Commissioners. They felt quite rightfully that the original proposed fine of €30m was far too low given the revenues of [...]
It appears that many solicitors have expressed their views on the legal issues that will arise from people returning to the workplace post Covid. The only common ground shared is that “there are legal issues!” The following should not be taken as legal advice, and has no basis more reliable than our own meandering experience (to misquote Baz Luhrmann). Can [...]
