Independent regulation gives confidence to consumers, providers, investors and society as a whole that legal services work in the public interest and support the rule of law. The Legal Services Act 2007 does not require all approved regulators to be structurally separate from representative bodies. Instead, the Legal Services Board is required by the Act to produce internal governance rules (IGR) which apply the principle of regulatory independence in legal service regulation. We are currently running a consultation on the IGR which continues until 9 February.

In December 2017, the Information Commissioner’s Office (reported that data security incidents between April and June 2017 had increased by 15% compared to the previous year. This is nothing new – data breaches have been on the rise for years. Yet law firms are often more concerned about protecting sensitive information from external threats than from a far more likely cause: human error. Human error was behind the forwarding of confidential plans from The Bank of England to The Guardian. The sender included the wrong recipient in the email and, ever since, autocomplete has been disabled and staff at the UK’s main financial regulator must now enter every single address manually.

Successive governments have considered increasing the small claims limit for personal injury claims, at the behest of the insurance industry lobby, from £1,000 to £5,000. But the lower limit remains unchanged because, so far, evidence and reasoning have prevailed. The last time the government tried to implement an increase was in 2013 when it concluded that it would keep the issue under consideration for implementation “when appropriate”. Nothing has happened to suppose a small claims limit of £5,000 is any more “appropriate” in 2018 than it was in 2013.

Created in 2009, virtual currency bitcoin has seen a surge over the past year – both in terms of recognition and market value. Whilst the benefits of the prolific cryptocurrency include the option of anonymity and absence of transaction fees, its superficial gloss has been somewhat tarnished by certain factors – all of which could affect its chances of being used in a property transaction. One of the most widely reported drawbacks of Bitcoin is its volatility. So far, the digital currency has seen phenomenal overall growth in the last year but it has also suffered some serious ups and downs on a monthly, weekly, and even daily basis.

It’s that time of year again. Thinking about what’s gone before us and planning for the future – looking at what we do, how we do it, and more importantly, who we do it for. The last 10 years or so have seen the legal sector go through a period of unprecedented change, a period of change that shows no sign of abating any time soon. While ‘Tesco Law’ hasn’t brought Armageddon to the high street, (as I was told it would during the very first law firm conference I attended back in 2010), without doubt, for the vast majority of those in practice, the legal sector is a very different place to what it was in 2007, pre-economic downturn.