It’s been a winter like no other… or has it? Perhaps this time it’s just rain and wind, not snow and ice. Is this simply what nature throws at us on our rocky outcrop in the North Atlantic? What’s certain is that weather patterns have become extreme over the last 15 or so years, prompting climate scientists to rewrite models predicting more severe weather bringing more moisture and therefore more flooding. But what does this mean for home buyers and the conveyancers acting for them?

There is a lot of web chatter about the value of brands in legal services and there are ongoing attempts to build national legal brands, so it is clear that there is fairly widespread acceptance that there is some ‘brand value’ in law. But the best way to exploit your brand is to stay local and work with other local brands.

Two events in London last week were connected by the withdrawal of civil legal aid and its consequences for the justice system. One was a major report on technological alternatives to legally aided services, and the other was a Legal Services Consumer Panel roundtable discussion on fee-charging McKenzie Friends.

In a guest blog, Chris Kenny, the chief executive of the Legal Services Board, outlines the need for further simplification and liberalisation to encourage greater competition and innovation in the legal market, and says that the notion of going back to self-regulation will return the law to its bad old days.

We are now a little over two years since the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) began accepting applications from would-be alternative business structures (ABSs), and a little under two years since it issued the first licenses. I have a sense that some are disappointed by what has happened since then. In the main they shouldn’t be – the transient nature of news, I think, has made people forget just how many interesting and different legal services providers have emerged in the last two years. But from one perspective, and I will come back to this later, I can see their point.