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Large numbers of barristers’ chambers are flouting an obligation to publish diversity data and the Bar Standards Board has been “unsophisticated” in its implementation of Legal Services Board diversity rules, a significant study has concluded.

Barristers have complained that the decision of their regulator to make public the risk of commercial pressures damaging the Bar could on its own have a negative impact on the profession’s reputation. There are also reports of “growing anxiety” among young barrister about chambers being run as corporate organisations.

The Legal Services Board has strongly criticised the Solicitors Regulation Authority over failures in its enforcement work and IT systems – and also warned about the risk that the overhaul of the Handbook “may be too much” for firms and the regulator to cope with. However, the LSB said the legal regulators collectively had all made “substantial progress”.

Commercial pressures on barristers are causing high risk behaviours that are detectable in complaints received by the Bar Standards Board, an assessment of future regulatory dangers has revealed. It also highlighted what it claimed were indications that senior barristers were abusing their position of power over women, pupils, and junior barristers.

Barristers specialising in professional negligence are more likely than colleagues in any other area of law to generate complaints, a report by the Bar Standards Board has found. The research found that ethnicity did not have an impact on complaints, but gender did, with men more likely to be complained about.