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Scary Spice
At some stage in your career – probably many years ago – someone will have asked you to describe your perfect job or where you saw yourself in 10 years’ time. Maybe you talked earnestly about your burning desire to bring justice to the masses. More likely, you claimed that your ultimate goal was to be partner in the interviewer’s fine establishment. Chances are you didn’t say: “What I want, what I really really want, is to be a compliance officer for legal practice.” – Allison Wooddisse discusses what firms should include in a COLP’s job description.
Feel the shame – the table you won’t want to top
The fierce debate over whether the Legal Ombudsman (LeO) should name those lawyers/firms against whom complaints are made has not gone away despite LeO’s decision to press ahead with the policy. And a story on it in yesterday’s Daily Mail gave a preview of what this could all mean in practice. “Shaming the rogue lawyers: list of Britain’s worst solicitors to be published for the first time,” ran the headline.
Will expanding your practice make you more profitable – or more vulnerable?
Any form of growth requires funding. Traditionally law firms have funded growth (or in some cases losses) from the high street banks. We have all recognised that this option no longer exists – or does it? The reality is that if you have a good solid history and a sound business plan, then most of the banks will still provide this badly needed access to capital. If you are not so fortunate, how are you going to expand without investing either your own cash, or someone else’s?
Share and share alike
Andrew Whitehouse of corporate finance house Smith Square Partners – which is targeting the legal market after tying up with ABS Advisory Partners – says that with consolidation set to accelerate, converting to a corporate structure is the best way for law firms to take advantage of it
What’s in a word?
Governance seems to be the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s new favourite word. It crops up in the most fashionable parts of the SRA Handbook – in her latest blog on COLPs and COFAs, Allison Wooddisse, head of Legal Futures Associate LexisPSL Practice Compliance, tries to work out what the SRA means when it talks about law firms’ governance.
Two nations – divided by external ownership of law firms
Many of the lawyers who have only just woken up to the prospect of non-lawyer ownership of firms (a sizeable group, I’d wager) generally react with horror. The argument I hear all the time – exemplified by the letter signed by nine general counsel in the US – is that it will dilute the professionalism of lawyers, damage the lawyer-client relationship and lead to dastardly non-lawyers strong-arming lawyers to put profit before ethics.
Putting the LSB back in its box
If we are to judge the success of a regulator by the degree to which it really annoys those it regulates, then the Legal Services Board (LSB) has done an absolutely bang-up job these past three years. It is just over 12 months since I first blogged about whispers questioning the long-term need for the LSB once independent regulation, the Legal Ombudsman and alternative business structures were all up and running. Well, they are whispers no more.
QualitySolicitors – The Movie
So at last we got to see what private equity investment, Saatchi & Saatchi and a £15m advertising budget has bought QualitySolicitors – a TV advert for legal services the like of which I certainly haven’t seen before, a world away from the “Had an accident in the last three years?” genre.
Preparing for the law firm beauty parade
There have now been well over 100 alternative business structure applications since 3 January 2012 and we should see the first approvals imminently. So, what does this mean for the estimated 75% of practices which are just sitting and watching and hoping this will all go away? Should they be preparing to join the law firm beauty parade that will decide which law firms are purchased, sold and merged? Or are they right to wait on the side lines, biding their time?
A compliance plan: the Emperor’s new clothes?
Is a compliance plan a COLP’s need-to-have or simply a nice-to-have and, more to the point, what on earth is a compliance plan? Compliance plans are the Emperor’s New Clothes of the SRA regulatory regime. Everyone’s talking about them, but no-one wants to admit they can’t see them and they don’t know what they are. There’s a good reason for this – compliance plan requirements are virtually invisible in the SRA Handbook. Allison Wooddisse explains.
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