Legal Services Board

The Covid-19 crisis will not stop the introduction of the Solicitors Qualifying Exam in September 2021, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has said as it published the exam’s final design.

The Legal Ombudsman is set for a major leadership shake-up in the wake of its recent budget debacle and following the decision of the chief ombudsman to leave.

Lawtech products may need to be directly regulated as they become more complex, and it is harder for lawyers to understand how the underlying algorithms work, new research has suggested.

A review of the Legal Services Act 2007 is not on the agenda, the government has confirmed. It also indicated that it was happy with the work done by the Legal Services Board

Legal technology education is focused too much on ‘hot topics’ like machine learning and blockchain, making it “disjointed and ad hoc” in character, a paper for the Legal Services Board has argued.

The Legal Services Board has given the Bar Council a slap on the wrist for the comments it made in a Legal Futures article about staffing levels at the oversight regulator.

The Legal Services Board is to create a standing panel of members of the public to help develop future policies – in addition to its existing consumer panel.

The Legal Services Board is planning to review a “random sample” of regulators’ disciplinary decisions to ensure the right processes and procedures are in place.

Seven of the eight frontline regulators have “confirmed their continued commitment” to the Legal Choices website, despite the Solicitors Regulation Authority no longer wanting to run it.

The Legal Services Board is launching a formal review of the Bar Standards Board’s leadership and decision-making in the wake of its controversial decision to stop funding the Legal Choices website.

Changes to the list of reserved activities that only authorised lawyers can do has been floated as one way the ways legal regulation could be flexed to help the profession recover from the Covid-19 crisis.

Government schemes to help SME companies grow by offering investors tax relief exclude legal businesses and so constrict technological innovation in the market, it has been claimed.

The Bar Council has called on the Legal Services Board not to recruit more staff during the coronavirus crisis for the task of overseeing legal bodies’ internal governance.

The Legal Ombudsman has hit crisis point again after it was forced to backtrack on its request for a 20% budget rise, with the Legal Services Board describing its performance as unacceptable.

MPs on the justice select committee have endorsed the appointment of Elisabeth Davies as chair of the Office for Legal Complaints, the board that oversees the Legal Ombudsman.