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The Legal Services Board has set out its plans to recoup its running costs, and those of the Office for Legal Complaints, based on a per capita basis and of complaints against each part of the legal profession.

A new Cabinet committee is to review whether the Office for Legal Complaints (OLC) and alternative business structures (ABSs) should be implemented, it emerged yesterday. The news comes as The Times speculated today that the new team at the Ministry of Justice might kick ABSs into the long grass, but investigations by Legal Futures indicate that there is no foundation for this.

As we reported yesterday, the results of the economic impact analysis commissioned by the Legal Services Board concluded that the consumer does not suffer any detriment. The hard truth is that if they are not distorting the market, the argument to ban them is hard to maintain. But I am not entirely convinced by the research. The conclusions that the researchers, Charles River Associates, came to on the basis of the evidence before them seem fair enough. What bothers me slightly is whether they really sought enough evidence. It feels a touch superficial to me.

A row is brewing between the Law Society and Legal Services Board over the wind-down of the Legal Complaints Service, Legal Futures can reveal. Law Society chief executive Des Hudson has told us that the LSB’s insistence that the LCS’s current performance targets stay in place as it heads towards closure, despite dwindling staff, is “unthoughtful and an error of judgement”.

ILEX Professional Standards (IPS) is to seek conveyancing and criminal advocacy and litigation rights for legal executives, it has emerged. It forms part of IPS’s plan to become a regulator of alternative business structures.