Legal Services Board

The Legal Services Board is to keep the performance of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in issuing alternative business structure licences under scrutiny, it has emerged. We have discovered that in January it issued a statutory notice requiring the SRA to provide information.

A new outcomes-focused approach to becoming a chartered legal executive, which could also cut the time it takes to qualify by reducing the ‘time served’ aspect of the process, has been approved by the Legal Services Board.

The Legal Services Board (LSB) has hit back at its critics, accusing frontline legal regulators of being “uncomfortable” with the language of competition and failing to examine the impact of regulation on the market.

The Legal Services Board has criticised the Solicitors Regulation Authority for restricting liberalisation of the rule that previously prevented local authorities from charging charities and voluntary organisations for legal services.

Barristers can now speak to the press about their cases, after the Bar’s Code of Conduct was changed. The end to the rule prohibiting barristers from expressing personal opinion publicly in relation to their work finally brings them in line with solicitor-advocates.

The Legal Services Board has criticised the Bar Standards Board’s failure to apply the cab-rank rule to public access work and said this omission will reduce the impact of rule changes that widen the scope for barristers dealing directly with clients.

The prospect of chartered legal executives setting up their own law firms moved closer to reality yesterday after their regulator submitted an application for the full range of independent practice rights. It has won immediate support from a Conservative MP.

Banning referral fees in personal injury may have unintended consequences that will be worse than the current situation, Legal Services Board chairman David Edmonds told MPs yesterday. He also said the current regulatory regime could move rapidly to a single over-arching regulator.

Just one in eight small businesses believe that lawyers provide a cost-effective solution to legal problems, new research has found. The finding suggests far larger unmet legal need among SMEs than among the general public.

There is “a compelling moral and economic case” for the Legal Services Board to pursue initiatives such as an NHS Direct-style telephone service to help people find the legal advice they need, its consumer adviser has urged.