Legal Services Board

The Legal Services Consumer Panel is on the hunt for a new chair after the incumbent jumped ship after just a year to become a member of the Office for Legal Complaints, the body that oversees the Legal Ombudsman. Meanwhile, the Law Society has named the members of its new main board, a key part of its new governance structure.

The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants was yesterday given the green light to regulate its members in handling probate work. Approving the regulatory scheme it is putting in place, the Legal Services Board said ACCA members would make a “positive contribution” to the legal market.

The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) is set to become the second accountancy body that enables its members – 90,000 of them in the UK – to provide probate services. If approved by the Legal Services Board, it will follow the lead of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

The current framework of legal regulation is “inconsistent”, the Ministry of Justice accepted today, but said it could not commit to the formal review sought by the Competition and Markets Authority and others. It also said it would not take forward the plan to completely separate legal regulators from representative bodies.

The Legal Services Board is to launch a project to investigate the regulatory implications of the latest technology, including artificial intelligence. It has also promised to be “an agent of change” for the legal services sector, encourage innovation by identifying measures to remove barriers to entry to the legal market and also stimulate competition.

The Legal Services Board has rejected a call from its consumer panel to consider a centralised regime of financial protection for clients to replace what the panel called the “fragmented” nature of insurance and compensation arrangements across the different legal regulators.

Fees for conveyancing and lasting powers of attorney have fallen over the past two years, while they have risen for family work, a report by the Legal Services Board has found. It also revealed that only 18% of law firms publish prices for any of their work in these areas on their websites.

A “steady stream of disagreements” between legal regulators and representative bodies means the rules governing their relationships may need to be rewritten, the Legal Services Board said yesterday. The oversight regulator said it had been notified of 30 disputes over the past three years.

There needs to be a “more diverse and innovative legal services market” in England and Wales that attracts new providers and offers new opportunities “for the current and future legal profession”, the Lord Chancellor has said. David Lidington also hinted that further regulatory reform was still on the agenda.

The new president of the Supreme Court yesterday joined what appears to be a growing clamour to reinstate public funding to provide early legal advice. Lady Hale also reiterated her concern about the possible downgrading of the objective in legal regulation to encourage an “independent, strong, diverse and effective legal profession”.

The Legal Services Board has approved a rule change by the Solicitors Regulation Authority which will make it easier for law firms to switch regulators. In a move which is likely to see more firms leave the SRA than join it, the requirement that they must obtain six years of run-off cover before switching to another regulator will be removed.

The Legal Services Board has marked as “sufficient” action plans produced by legal regulators to introduce price transparency and release other information to the public to help with purchasing decisions. The verdict on the original action plans published at the end of June came in the wake of the regulators moving to the next stage of consulting on how they would implement transparency.

The Legal Services Board has been warned against trying to force the introduction of the civil standard of proof in the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal without proper consultation. The Law Society said it was “inappropriate” for the board to use performance assessments of the regulators it oversees to require them to introduce a lower standard.

The Lord Chancellor, David Lidington, has unexpectedly rejected the Legal Services Board’s recommendation that chartered accountants should be able to handle litigation, advocacy and legal instruments in taxation work. It is the first time the Ministry of Justice has rejected a regulatory extension of this nature,

The government indicated today that it will not go ahead with plans to completely separate legal regulators from their linked professional bodies, such as the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Law Society. It came in a review of the Legal Services Board and Office for Legal Complaints that found both “generally operating efficiently and effectively”.