Out of the shadows – part 2
Having recently taken a look at who is running the Legal Services Board, this week it is the turn of the board of the Office for Legal Complaints, which will oversee the Legal Ombudsman service. You will see there is at least two law firms in the land that will have no excuses if they fall foul of the new complaints regime because they have direct links with members of the board.
A game of chicken
When I published my story the week before last on the Legal Services Board’s (LSB) demand that four of the professional bodies introduce lay majorities on their regulatory boards sooner than they planned, I said I would add their responses when received. Those who have been breathlessly awaiting these pearls of their regulators’ wisdom will have been disappointed.
Out of the shadows
Just who are the members of the Legal Services Board? They have stayed in the shadows, as chairman David Edmonds and chief executive Chris Kenny are the public faces of what they do. We don’t even know much of what they do in their meetings, because the minutes are not easily accessible on their website and Mr Edmonds is always implacable whenever I suggest that it would be good if their meetings were open – or at least part of them, in the same way that the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board split their meetings between public and private sessions.
Equal before the law?
The strained relationship that black and minority ethnic (BME) solicitors have with their regulator came back sharply into view this week with publication of a report into BME solicitors’ disproportionately high representation in the regulatory activities of the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
The problem with paralegals
Monty Python fans will recall the scene from ‘Life of Brian’ involving the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front and the Judean Popular People’s Front. Well, it sometimes seems that this inspired those jockeying for position in the paralegal world. We have the National Association of Licensed Paralegals, the Institute of Paralegals and the Society of Specialist Paralegals. Now we have the Law Society potentially moving into their market by investigating whether there is any scope for it to develop a paralegal qualification.
