News

A Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) committee has approved a range of alternatives to the “sledgehammer” of intervention in troubled law firms, even though they pose a greater risk of default or increased loss. The SRA’s compliance committee backed approaches such as targeted practising certificate conditions and giving firms limited time to correct breaches, transfer or close altogether. In some circumstances, pre-packaged administration might be appropriate.

The chief executive of the Legal Services Board (LSB) has issued a robust defence of its plans to require every firm and chambers to carry out and publish an annual workforce diversity survey. Chris Kenny confirmed that the LSB was not talking about imposing quotas or targets, nor publishing a sector-wide league table, but said such information “will enable individuals and researchers to better hold firms to account through highlighting the best and worst performers – and the nature of the gap between them”.

The independence of the legal profession from government is under threat from Whitehall, Legal Services Consumer Panel chairwoman Dr Dianne Hayter warned on Saturday. Speaking at the Bar Council annual conference, Dr Hayter revealed that the Legal Services Board (LSB), Legal Ombudsman and consumer panel have all been told to close their websites, while she highlighted the threat from legislation that will allow government to abolish or amend the terms of the LSB.

Every chambers, “from the most vulnerable of publicly funded sets to the most smug and complacent of specialist, privately funded sets”, needs to prepare for change, with the Bar’s ProcureCo model opening up “hundreds of millions of pounds of work” to barristers, the chairman of the Bar Council said on Saturday. Addressing the annual Bar conference, Nicholas Green QC also expressed his “moral qualms” about the number of students trying to enter the Bar compared to the number of available pupillages, and about how many of those who fail to find vocational training are instead creating a “paralegal workforce”, saying the aptitude test being introduced for bar students may not be enough.

The government is set to take forward Lord Young’s proposals to extend the road traffic claims process to all low-value personal injury and clinical negligence cases, while the Jackson reforms are imminent, the Ministry of Justice confirmed today.

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) should be the sole regulator for advocacy, the chairman of the Legal Services Board has said. Speaking at a BSB-organised session at Saturday’s Bar Council annual conference in London, David Edmonds said he agreed with the Master of Rolls, Lord Neuberger, who had earlier told the conference that the number of regulators “all regulating [advocacy] is ridiculous” and that if the 2007 Legal Services Act “does not lead to activity-based regulation, it will have failed”.

After all the predictions of solicitors’ professional indemnity insurance (PII) premiums going through the roof, figures from the Solicitors Regulation Authority show a 15% fall across the profession for 2010/11, back to pre-recession levels. However, there has been a massive 57% jump in the number of firms in the assigned risks pool.

Legal services is one of the markets most failing UK consumers, with bankers and insurers among those doing a better job, pioneering European Union research has revealed. Lawyers are just ahead of second-hand car salesmen, however. The Legal Services Consumer Panel has branded the results “embarrassing” and said lawyers will have to up their game significantly if they are to resist competition from alternative business structures.

Is it time for solicitors to panic? The significance of the announcement that the AA and Saga have launched legal services websites is less in what they are offering but in the fact that they are the latest big brands to see potential in the legal market.

The second in a series of extracts from Climate Change, a report on the impact of the Legal Services Act published by accountants Baker Tilly, looks at the growing role of outsourcing both front and back-office work, and how far it could go.