Other lawyers

A ban on referral fees in conveyancing is unjustifiable, according to a narrow majority of respondents to a Council for Licensed Conveyancers consultation – but there was strong support for enhanced disclosure requirements.

The Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) has confirmed it will again attempt to extend the scope of services it regulates later this year and fired the opening shot of a campaign to issue licenses to individuals who are not conveyancers.

All legal services providers should undertake and publish equal pay audits, the Legal Services Board (LSB) has suggested – this would ideally be voluntary, “but only if it results in the changes needed”. It came in an LSB review of the evidence on equal pay.

A training regime whose only specification is what a newly-qualified lawyer should be able to offer on day one is the kind of deregulation the Legal Education and Training Review should be considering, according to the chief executive of the Legal Services Board.

The Law Society will challenge the application by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales to become an alternative business structure regulator, Legal Futures can report. The question of separating regulation and representation is a key bone of contention.

The Chartered Institute of Legal Executives and Council for Licensed Conveyancers have thrown their hats into the ring to regulate will-writers, amid further criticism of the Legal Services Board’s decision not to extend regulation to estate administration.

The Legal Services Board (LSB) will today formally recommend to the Lord Chancellor that will-writing – but not estate administration – should be regulated legal work. The LSB had initially intended to include estate administration.

Legal regulators have failed to open up their professional registers containing disciplinary information to price comparison websites, despite having been instructed to do so by the Legal Services Board, the Legal Services Consumer Panel has complained.

Regulators need to speed up their processes for approving alternative business structures, the Office of Fair Trading said today. It also called for further simplification of the complaints system, recommended actions to increase the number of available pupillages and gave cautious support for the move away from title-based regulation.

Some of the frontline regulators have hit back at the Legal Services Board’s assessment of their performance. A detailed report on the “smaller” regulators found a wide range of competence, both across the different regulators and within each of them individually.