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The Legal Services Board’s “unduly detailed approach to oversight” risks undermining professional independence, the Law Society president has claimed. John Wotton also argued that alternative business structures have “no magic bullet in competitive terms”.

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.

We may be in an era of outcomes-focused regulation, but nobody thought to tell those who drew up the deal between the Law Society and Solicitors Regulation Authority over their governance arrangements. To me it is further evidence that the arrangement by which the SRA is both independent and yet part of the Law Society is unlikely to stand the test of time

The Legal Ombudsman should press to extend its jurisdiction to complaints about non-lawyer will-writers and the not-for-profit sector, while the government needs to review its inadequate powers over complaints against CMCs, a study has recommended.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is unlikely to start licensing alternative business structures (ABSs) until 2012, it has confirmed. The news comes as the authority spelt out the detailed level of information about investors in prospective ABSs that it will expect to see.