Legal Executives

The Lord Chancellor has welcomed the approval of the redesigned qualification that allows students without degrees to qualify as chartered legal executives with full practice rights.

The Legal Services Board is set to recommend an accreditation scheme for review and comparison websites as take-up among both law firms and consumers continues to rise.

CILEX has added its voice to warnings that working as a criminal legal aid lawyer is no longer a sustainable career, with the number of members studying criminal law halving in less than a decade.

The Bar Council and Council for Licensed Conveyancers have warned of the dangers of using “one-sided” consumer reviews to assess the quality of lawyers.

A solicitor’s misconduct cannot negate a non-solicitor employee’s misconduct or shield them from being banned from working for law firms, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has ruled.

Twenty law firms and seven comparison and review websites have signed up to a regulator-run pilot that will test how they can best work together to improve the information available to consumers.

An experienced chartered legal executive who purported to have witnessed her clients’ signatures on a property transfer form has been banned from working in law firms.

CILEX has unveiled a redesigned qualification that allows students without degrees to qualify as lawyers with full practice rights or achieve recognised paralegal standards.

The Legal Services Board is pushing ahead with plans to introduce continuing competence checks for lawyers. This could include feedback from consumers, judges and peers, assurance visits or revalidation.

The Legal Ombudsman is “setting itself up to fail” by proposing to give itself more work than it can cope with and asking for an “extraordinary high” budget increase of 19%.