Barristers

The Legal Services Board is expected take over responsibility for overseeing the regulation of immigration advisers by the legal professional bodies from the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner (OISC), starting in April 2011.

Mandatory quality assurance for criminal advocates is welcome but the scheme currently proposed by the legal profession falls short in several significant ways, the Legal Services Consumer Panel said today. Among the problems are a failure to consider consumer needs, weaker standards than had been consulted on, and allowing advocates to choose which cases they are assessed on.

The chief executive of the Legal Services Board (LSB) has issued a robust defence of its plans to require every firm and chambers to carry out and publish an annual workforce diversity survey. Chris Kenny confirmed that the LSB was not talking about imposing quotas or targets, nor publishing a sector-wide league table, but said such information “will enable individuals and researchers to better hold firms to account through highlighting the best and worst performers – and the nature of the gap between them”.

Every chambers, “from the most vulnerable of publicly funded sets to the most smug and complacent of specialist, privately funded sets”, needs to prepare for change, with the Bar’s ProcureCo model opening up “hundreds of millions of pounds of work” to barristers, the chairman of the Bar Council said on Saturday. Addressing the annual Bar conference, Nicholas Green QC also expressed his “moral qualms” about the number of students trying to enter the Bar compared to the number of available pupillages, and about how many of those who fail to find vocational training are instead creating a “paralegal workforce”, saying the aptitude test being introduced for bar students may not be enough.

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) should be the sole regulator for advocacy, the chairman of the Legal Services Board has said. Speaking at a BSB-organised session at Saturday’s Bar Council annual conference in London, David Edmonds said he agreed with the Master of Rolls, Lord Neuberger, who had earlier told the conference that the number of regulators “all regulating [advocacy] is ridiculous” and that if the 2007 Legal Services Act “does not lead to activity-based regulation, it will have failed”.

Solicitors are set to shoulder the vast majority of the Legal Services Board (LSB) and Legal Ombudsman’s (LeO) £25m annual running costs for the next three years at least, it emerged today. The LSB confirmed that it would proceed with its plan to levy its own £5m costs on the basis of the number of authorised persons overseen by each approved regulator, and most of LeO’s £20m costs based on the number of complaints generated by each group.

The introduction of controversial new standard contractual terms for solicitors instructing barristers has been further delayed by confusion over the split of responsibilities between the Bar Council and Bar Standards Board, Legal Futures can reveal. The BSB also has a new director and has formally launched its chambers monitoring scheme.

Over half of all law firms have either lost business to a non-lawyer competitor or expect to in the future, a new survey from accountants Baker Tilly has revealed. Some 29% of firms with 25 partners or fewer had already lost business to a non-lawyer competitor, compared to 12% of larger practices.

The Legal Ombudsman (LeO) will seek to determine complaints that cross over into professional negligence, it has emerged. Chief ombudsman Adam Sampson said that while its predecessor bodies, such as the Legal Complaints Service, would shy away from complaints about the quality of legal advice offered, the Legal Services Act “makes no mention of any such limitation of our powers”.

The Law Society is to enlarge the board of the Solicitors Regulation Authority so as to introduce parity between the number of solicitor and lay members in a deal struck with the Legal Services Board. It follows a similar agreement between the LSB and Bar Standards Board, whose offer to introduce parity on the road to a lay majority has been accepted.

Regulators should consider making diversity training mandatory for senior partners and line managers in law firms, say academics after research uncovered a complex web of barriers between minorities and women, and the upper reaches of the legal profession. The findings will be backed up by a forthcoming study into pay disparity by the Law Society that has uncovered “a kind of structural inequality”.

The Court of Appeal has today unanimously confirmed that legal professional privilege does not apply to any other professional except solicitors and barristers. It follows a case in which the Law Society and Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales intervened on opposite sides.

Barristers need some carve-outs from the requirements to tell clients about their complaints procedure, the Legal Services Board is to be told. The Bar Standards Board suggests that the drafters did not understand the realities of barristers’ practice.

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) will become a specialist regulator of entities providing advocacy services, if proposals set out today are approved. Under the plans, BSB-regulated entities could not have passive investors, would need a majority of managers who can practise as advocates in the higher courts, and could only have a maximum of either 10% or 25% of non-lawyer managers.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board are in discussions about creating a joint online consumer network involving the general public, Legal Futures has learned. The move follows pressure from the Legal Services Consumer Panel for the frontline regulators to improve engagement with consumers