Legal Services Board

Law firms no longer need to carry out reserved activities in order to be regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority – but the regulator has offered assurances that it will not seek to bring the currently unregulated into its net as a form of quasi-accreditation.

There is still a long way to go before there is “effective competition” in the legal market, the Legal Services Board has told the Competition and Markets Authority. The oversight regulator urged the CMA not to rule out the possibility of conducting a full market investigation at this stage.

The Legal Services Board is set to make encouraging comparison sites to enter the legal market one of its goals for the next year, along with telling regulators to be clearer about how they spend the profession’s money.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced a study of the legal services sector for consumers and small businesses so as to examine “long-standing concerns” about affordability and standards of service. The CMA said concerns had also been raised about the “complexity of the current regulatory framework”.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is to research this year whether standards of criminal advocacy are declining and whether solicitors are to blame. As part of the research, the SRA said it would ask judges whether solicitor-advocates were “working beyond their level of competence”.

The number of complaints to the Legal Ombudsman about claims management companies is gathering pace and passed 15,000 in the first nine months of 2015, it has emerged. LeO said almost half of the complaints were about fees.

Lawyers will have to wait patiently for another chance to complain to the government about the Legal Services Board (LSB) as it emerged that the board’s second ‘triennial review’, due this year, has been scrapped.

The Office for Legal Complaints is to put in place a new performance plan for the Legal Ombudsman next year to tackle falling standards, it has emerged. Steve Green, chair of the OLC, promised things would be on an “upward trajectory” next year.

The Legal Services Board has begun work on whether it could and should introduce a voluntary regulation scheme for currently unregulated legal services providers. As part of a wider package of work on unregulated providers, it is also to investigate in depth their role in the will writing and estate administration, family law, and intellectual property markets.

In a further twist to an already complicated saga, the Legal Ombudsman has decided not to become a certified alternative dispute resolution body for the time being. Certification would double LeO’s deadline for complaints from six to 12 months.

The Legal Services Board has joined solicitors in questioning government plans to introduce additional regulation of criminal advocacy. The Bar Council supported the proposals by the Ministry of Justice.

Real separation of representative and regulatory functions at organisations like the Law Society and Bar Council is “unfinished business” of the Legal Services Act, according to the woman who led the society’s negotiations with the government in the run-up to the Act.

A probe into what impact post-Legal Services Act competition has had on the cost of legal services has been launched. The Legal Services Board said that understanding changes in prices over time was one of the “key measures of the impacts of regulatory reforms designed to promote competition”.

There are “no strong brands yet” to advise small businesses on legal services and law firms tend to “look the same”, Mark Edwards, vice president and general manager of Rocket Lawyer UK, has said. Mr Edwards said innovation was “not happening as much as it should be” in the legal market.

Kathryn Stone, a police complaints commissioner, is to become chief ombudsman at the Legal Ombudsman in January next year. The appointment comes at a time when new figures put LeO under further pressure from the Legal Services Board over deteriorating performance against its targets.