Legal Services Board

The Legal Services Board has put a temporary block on plans by the Solicitors Regulation Authority to widen its net to cover providers that do not need to be regulated. It said the reforms “could be seen as a significant shift in the regulation of legal services”.

A former City solicitor has been appointed as the new chief executive of the Legal Services Board – the first lawyer to hold the post. Neil Buckley, who spent eight years at Sinclair Roche & Temperley (now part of Stephenson Harwood), joins in January from Ofcom.

It is important that government plans to enhance the quality of criminal defence advocacy in publicly funded cases “should not be designed around one particular professional group”, the Legal Services Board has warned. The comments can be read as coded concern that some of the proposals seem weighted in favour of barristers.

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) has been discharged from an undertaking it gave nearly two years ago to deal with concerns over the way it dealt with changes to the cab-rank rule. But in doing so, the Legal Services Board said it had continuing misgivings that have “directed our attention towards the BSB’s approach to regulation more broadly”.

Consumers using ‘unbundled’ legal services generally report a positive experience and it has the potential to widen access to justice, groundbreaking exploratory research has found. However, it made clear that other solutions were also needed to address the legal needs of “more vulnerable consumers” unable to unbundle.

Regulation accounts for between 15% and 23% of the costs of law firms, money they would generally not bother spending if they were not required to, an indicative study by the Legal Services Board has found. However, the opposite was the case for lawyers practising as individuals.

The removal of regulatory restrictions on in-house lawyers could provide greater access to justice for consumers, the Legal Services Board has said. It also warned the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board that the reviews of the rules for in-house lawyers they are starting “will need to be far reaching”.

There is a “compelling case to introduce a new regulatory settlement” for the legal market in the medium term, the Legal Services Board told the government today. A report said it was “increasingly clear” that the absence of full separation between the representative bodies and legal regulators is proving “a strong impediment to progress”.

The Bar Standards Board is to dispense with its ‘list of defaulting solicitors’ and replace it with a new rule allowing barristers to refuse work under the cab-rank rule where there is an “unacceptable risk” that they will not get paid.

The Legal Services Board has approved radical reforms of the separate business rule for solicitors, while noting that the changes “carry some risks to consumers”. Information on the difference between regulated and unregulated services is to be tested with consumers before the change comes into force.