Barristers

The “golden age” is over for barristers as the Bar faces falling income and shrinking numbers, a new report has claimed. However, the Bar still has “an enormous amount in its favour”, according to leading legal consultancy Jomati, which also found evidence of a correlation between the best-performing sets and large numbers of QCs and marketing staff.

Every chambers in England and Wales is to be quizzed on their approach to equality and diversity as part of a new monitoring scheme being rolled out by the Bar Standards Board. The 791 chambers (of which 391 are registered as sole practitioners) are also to face questions on how they handle complaints, their policies on pupillage, and compliance with anti-money laundering rules.

The controversial prospect of publishing law firms’ complaints records will be put firmly back on the agenda with a consultation by the Legal Ombudsman, Legal Futures can report.

The Legal Services Board is pushing ahead with plans to require law firms and chambers to publish comprehensive diversity and class information about their staff from next year, Legal Futures has learned.

Junior barristers are facing huge rises in their practising certificate fees under reforms unveiled by the Bar Council. Women and black and minority ethnic barristers are set to be disproportionately hit by the increases, although the Bar Council says the waiver system for low earners will offset this.

Common advocacy standards for criminal law specialist barristers, solicitors and legal executives should be in place by July 2011, it has been announced. Judges will play a major role in assessing top advocates and in the ‘traffic light’ system that will identify poorly performing advocates.

The Legal Services Board is on a collision course with the Law Society and Bar Council after demanding that both introduce lay majorities on the boards of their regulatory arms sooner than planned, Legal Futures can reveal.

Two of the legal profession’s regulators are to begin recruitment exercises following senior resignations, Legal Futures can reveal. Mandie Lavin is stepping down as director of the Bar Standards Board, while Nick Smedley has resigned from the board of ILEX Professional Standards.

The Legal Services Board has set out its plans to recoup its running costs, and those of the Office for Legal Complaints, based on a per capita basis and of complaints against each part of the legal profession.

The government’s decision last week to scrap training grants for would-be legal aid lawyers was as inevitable as it was sad, and was all the more pointed for coming the day after the Association of Graduate Recruiters named law firms as the highest-paying graduate employers.

More than a third of barristers are likely to join a new business structure in the next five years, research has shown, and this number is likely to increase as understanding of the opportunities under the Legal Services Act improves.

The performance of the Legal Complaints Service (LCS) will provide a solid foundation from which the Office for Legal Complaints (OLC) can build, the Legal Services Ombudsman said today.

There has been a slow move to make up barristers as partners in legal disciplinary practices, Legal Futures can reveal. Figures from the Solicitors Regulation Authority indicate that just nine barristers have so far become partners.

The criminal bar needs to transform itself into “fully functioning litigation units” within the next 12 to 24 months if it wants to survive, the chairman of the Bar Council has warned in a paper that sets out his vision for how the bar needs to change to meet the challenges of the Legal Services Act.

There has been a sharp rise in the number of complaints against barristers this year, with solicitors increasingly complaining, Legal Futures can reveal. Complaints received by Dr Ann Barker, the bar’s Complaints Commissioner, were 38% higher in the first quarter of 2010 than in the same period last year.