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Hands up who feels sorry for the SRA. You at the back? Anyone? Just a smidgen of sympathy? I thought not – that certainly reflects what I hear from solicitors as I go out and about. The possibility of finding practitioners who might have been minded to give their regulator the benefit of the doubt has been extinguished by the practising certificate renewal fiasco. The Law Society has a long history of mucking up IT projects.

Our latest news round-up cover the SRA’s view of HSBC’s conveyancing undertaking, a fall in the number of firms closing ahead of PII renewal, a warning over merger failures, the Co-op seeking legal apprentices, and key appointments at Irwin Mitchell, the Law Society and CIPA.

The Law Society, in my experience, is rather good at making things complicated. For evidence, look no further than the new internal governance arrangements which received lukewarm support from the Legal Services Board shortly before Christmas. This may seem like a dry and esoteric issue to most. Virtually everyone, in fact, which is why pretty much nobody else seems to write about or comment on it. They are wrong.

Our round-up of other significant news stories includes a law firm using its new PI advertising campaign to highlight its opposition to the Jackson reforms, and the Law Society/SRA moving into swish new Birmingham offices.

The Law Society is targeting a fresh attack on before-the-event legal expenses insurers by seeking out a test case that aims to loosen their grip on policyholders’ choice of solicitor, it has emerged. The news comes as the Office of Fair Trading called for improvements in the way insurers sell the product.