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The Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board have begun work on creating an online “virtual community” for consumers known as “Legally Speaking”. The news comes as we can reveal the Legal Services Consumer Panel has escaped the “bonfire of the quangos” – just as the panel’s chairwoman is stepping down.

It wasn’t that long ago that you didn’t need a degree to become a solicitor. There are plenty of very eminent solicitors around who joined a law firm after school and did the old five-year articles to qualify. In fact training to be a solicitor started off purely as an apprenticeship in the form of articles of clerkship, with no examinations.

The Law Society has launched what appears to be a last-ditch bid to persuade the Legal Services Board to scrap the proposed scheme to assess the quality of criminal advocacy, saying there is no evidence to support the assertion that standards have fallen.

A former Court of Appeal judge and the one-time senior partner of City law firm Simmons & Simmons have been appointed joint chairs of a new consultation panel to advise on the fundamental education and training review – now known as “Review 2020″.

Charles Plant, the chairman of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), has finally said the unsayable and brought into focus what could well be the long-term future of regulation for lawyers – a single regulator for all, rather than the multiplicity we currently have.