Legal Executives

The Solicitor General has urged chartered legal executives to apply for judicial appointment in a bid to help make the bench more diverse. At the same time, a Sikh circuit judge told them that those entering the law from a non-traditional background had to have the mindset that they are better than those from a traditional one.

The Legal Services Board has marked as “sufficient” action plans produced by legal regulators to introduce price transparency and release other information to the public to help with purchasing decisions. The verdict on the original action plans published at the end of June came in the wake of the regulators moving to the next stage of consulting on how they would implement transparency.

The Bar Standards Board will say today that new rules on publishing prices should extend to referral barristers as well as those handling public access work. It comes as the Council for Licensed Conveyancers also issued their plans for improving transparency to help the consumers of legal services.

HM Courts and Tribunals Service has delayed the start of the flexible operating hours pilot until next February, its chief executive announced today. Susan Acland-Hood also made it clear that she was listening to the concerns raised by the legal profession about both the current problems with listing and how flexible hours might work.

The Chartered Institute of Legal Executives has become the latest legal regulator to apply to license alternative business structures. Chartered legal executives have been able to set up their own law firms since 2015, but not if they have non-lawyer ownership or investment.

Lawyers are among those who could face prosecution if they fail to report information that could undermine UK financial sanctions, after a change to the law that came into force this week. “Independent legal professionals”, along with trust or company service providers, accountants and others are now captured by the European Union Financial Sanctions Regulations 2017.

The Legal Services Board has given the frontline regulators largely positive reviews of their performance, but warned the Solicitors Regulation Authority that it will be monitoring the impact of its controversial decision to end public and press access to board meetings

Legal regulators have responded cautiously to the Competition and Markets Authority’s recommendations on price transparency, pledging to pilot regulatory requirements and test their effects on the lawyers and firms they regulate. They promised to implement controversial measures to encourage lawyers to publish prices if possible.

Law firm compliance officers and money laundering reporting officers have been scrambling to get to grips with the biggest shake-up in anti-money laundering rules in a decade, with the final regulations – which were only published on Thursday – coming into force today.

A chartered legal executive has launched a start-up alternative business structure specialising in personal injury but with ambitious plans for expansion into a variety of legal areas, including sports law.