Legal Services Act

Quindell chairman and chief executive Rob Terry saw his pay increase by nearly 50% in the last financial year, the alternative business structure’s annual report has revealed.

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) is unlikely to become an ABS licensing authority until 2015 and will not be regulating non-ABS firms, such barrister-only practices, before October this year, it has emerged.

Two of the country’s largest trade unions – the GMB and Communications Workers Union – have today broken new ground by creating an alternative business structure (ABS). Unionline is essentially a not-for-profit ABS as any profits will be ploughed back into the unions.

There is a huge unmet need for legal services among individual consumers, the most detailed ever study of the issue has revealed, with fewer than one in 10 people experiencing a legal problem seeking advice from a lawyer.

Clients are paying law firms fixed fees in almost half of all transactions, while unbundling is becoming a significant feature of the market place, a survey for the Legal Services Consumer Panel has found.

Frontline regulators need to trial a range of materials to help consumers make better decisions in the wake of the legal aid cuts, academic research commissioned by the Legal Services Board has urged.

Potential investors in Saga have been told that the over-50s specialist sees a “significant opportunity” to expand the customer base of its alternative business structure, Saga Law.

The Legal Services Board has told the government that if it wants to appoint ‘small business appeals champions’ for legal services, it should appoint them to the boards of the eight front-line regulators rather than the super-regulator.

Chris Kenny, chief executive of the Legal Services Board, has said that the government is “not saying never” to the idea of a single regulator for the entire profession, and it was likely to happen anyway in the coming years.

Preventing mortgage lenders from claiming on solicitors’ compulsory indemnity insurance will “destroy high street conveyancing”, Law Society chief executive Des Hudson has said, in a wide-ranging speech on the state of the profession.