It’s not often that I recommend that people plough through some of the turgid consultations that I plough through on their behalf, but I very much do in the case of the Legal Services Board’s distinctly unturgid discussion document on how it will “assess the boundaries of legal services regulation and connected regulatory decisions”. It is an extremely hard document to do justice to in a news story. This is big stuff – the future shape of legal practice.

Well done to First Title Insurance for taking the plunge and entering the professional indemnity insurance (PII) market for solicitors. I say this not because the company is a Legal Futures Associate, but because there has been considerable doom and gloom about the prospect of new entrants to the market in the wake of the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s decision to hold off abolishing the assigned risks pool until 2013. First Title is an interesting insurer because of its role in offering title insurance, which has always struck me as rather appealing for solicitors.

A first blog from associate editor Dan Bindman: I’ve been writing news stories about changes underway in the legal services market on and off for about a year now, and have been struck by the great variety of approaches to the significance of alternative business structures, both among lawyers and legal commentators. ABSs seem to represent a tsunami of change that will either undermine the ‘trusted professional’ status of lawyers, turning them into salesmen, or a long overdue market liberalisation; a boon to consumers bringing a much needed reality-check to a complacent profession – or something in between.

I suspect there is no coincidence that the Legal Ombudsman’s website is publicising its first annual report under the banner headline “Regulatory maze”. Those of you with long-ish memories may recall that this was the phrase used in 2003 by the then Department for Constitutional Affairs in the scoping study that paved the way for the Clementi reforms. Sir David himself adopted it to describe the confused regulatory infrastructure which his reforms were supposedly going to untangle.

There will no doubt be some finger pointing after our revelation today that the Solicitors Regulation Authority will not be in a position to start licensing alternative business structures on 6 October. Those with business plans worked up on the basis of 6 October will be rightly annoyed, and it hardly sends out an impressive signal.