Revealed: LSB ditches investigation into regulating 'general legal advice'


Grayling: no prospect of him agreeing to reserve general legal advice

The Legal Services Board has ditched its investigation into whether giving ‘general legal advice’ should become a reserved legal activity – but hinted it may look to remove probate from the existing list.

The decision follows the Lord Chancellor in May of the board’s recommendation to make will-writing a reserved activity.

This made it “unthinkable that the broad church of general legal advice could ever meet their test for becoming a reserved legal activity”, according to newly published LSB papers.

Instead the LSB is pursuing the issue through the wider debate of what should and should not be regulated prompted by the Ministry of Justice’s legal regulation review and the board’s own project looking at the cost and complexity of regulation.

The LSB did not recommend to Mr Grayling that probate be removed from the list because of uncertainties about the impact, but the paper said that “on the face of it, the case for probate activities being reserved is weak, far weaker than for will-writing”.

It continued: “This will be borne in mind as we undertake our review of what is regulated and how it is regulated through the cost and complexity project.”

The LSB stood by its recommendation to Mr Grayling. “The evidence for the conclusion that that proportionate regulation surpasses anything that has led to the reservation of any item on the existing list of reserved legal activities,” it said.

“All of the [alternative] actions suggested in the Lord Chancellor’s notice were considered and rejected as viable options by the board during the investigation.”

For example, voluntary schemes already exist but have not prevented the problems identified by the LSB, while educating all consumers about something they very infrequently purchase “would likely be impossible and, at best, prohibitively costly”.

The LSB considered issuing statutory guidance to the frontline regulators that they should still develop a specific set of requirements for all firms writing wills, but decided that this would be akin to asking them to treat will-writing as reserved despite the government decision.

Instead it will write to the approved regulators asking how they will be handling the risks arising as a result of will writing. “We do expect regulators to demonstrate that they have reviewed our investigation evidence and used this to inform their risk profiling and then focus regulatory oversight on the riskiest firms in the market.”

Tags:




    Readers Comments

  • So they want to make sure the regulators of unregulated activities have learned the lessons of poor regulation shown up by the research, so they can regulate the non regulated activities better.

    Or is it too late a night?


Leave a Comment

By clicking Submit you consent to Legal Futures storing your personal data and confirm you have read our Privacy Policy and section 5 of our Terms & Conditions which deals with user-generated content. All comments will be moderated before posting.

Required fields are marked *
Email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Blog


Five key issues to consider when adopting an AI-based legal tech

As generative AI starts to play a bigger role in our working lives, there are some key issues that your law firm needs to consider when adopting an AI-based legal tech.


Bulk litigation – not always working in consumers interests

For consumers to get the benefit, bulk litigation needs to be done well, and we are increasingly concerned that there are significant problems in some areas of this market.


ABSs, cost and audits – fixing regulation after Axiom Ince

A feature of law firm collapses and frauds has sometimes been the over-concentration of power in outdated and overburdened systems of control.


Loading animation