Legal Services Board

The Bar Standards Board has received the green light to license alternative business structures. The approval from the Legal Services Board needs to be confirmed by the Ministry of Justice. The BSB’s initial focus will be on “low-risk, advocacy focused ABSs”.

The Legal Services Board is set to instruct the frontline regulators like the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board to get tough with lawyers who do not handle client complaints properly. Draft guidance published for consultation yesterday said that they could stage “supervisory interventions” into poorly performing firms.

The Legal Services Board has said it expects the cost of regulating lawyers to be “going down, not up” as it approved a minor increase in the cost of practising for barristers. It said barristers should be given “much greater information” about how their money is spent.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) has outlined plans which would enable accountants to carry out all the reserved legal activities, including litigation and rights of audience. The ICAEW said its activities would be “restricted to the area of taxation”.

The Legal Services Board has set out plans allowing it to study in more detail spending by approved regulators, such as the Law Society and Bar Council, before it approves their practising fees. The LSB warned in November of a “potentially high-profile and contentious” dispute with Chancery Lane over the use of fees.

Law firms no longer need to carry out reserved activities in order to be regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority – but the regulator has offered assurances that it will not seek to bring the currently unregulated into its net as a form of quasi-accreditation.

There is still a long way to go before there is “effective competition” in the legal market, the Legal Services Board has told the Competition and Markets Authority. The oversight regulator urged the CMA not to rule out the possibility of conducting a full market investigation at this stage.

The Legal Services Board is set to make encouraging comparison sites to enter the legal market one of its goals for the next year, along with telling regulators to be clearer about how they spend the profession’s money.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced a study of the legal services sector for consumers and small businesses so as to examine “long-standing concerns” about affordability and standards of service. The CMA said concerns had also been raised about the “complexity of the current regulatory framework”.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is to research this year whether standards of criminal advocacy are declining and whether solicitors are to blame. As part of the research, the SRA said it would ask judges whether solicitor-advocates were “working beyond their level of competence”.