Legal Executives

Dame Elizabeth Filkin, a former Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, has become one of four lay members appointed to the new Chartered Institute of Legal Executives group board. The move comes as CILEx introduces a group structure with three companies

If the Legal Services Board is serious about promoting access to justice it must end its silence on the legal aid cuts, lawyers’ organisations have said. The Bar Council accused the oversight regulator of acting like “another department of government” by refusing to comment.

Legal regulators have urged the Legal Services Board to use its review of the internal governance rules to give them greater independence from their representative bodies. The Solicitors Regulation Authority said the rewrite of the rules should allow it to become a “separate legal entity” from the Law Society.

The Bar Standards Board is to regulate a law firm led by a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives, it has emerged. No practising barristers will be involved in the firm, but its principal is also an unregistered (ie, non-practising) barrister.

A law firm regulated by the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives is aiming to supervise the training of solicitors in what is understood to be the first move of its kind. In a separate development, a law firm regulated by the Bar Standards Board has started a pupillage scheme, in what might well also be a first.

Professor Chris Bones has been named the first chair of the CILEx Group as the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives presses ahead with its major governance restructuring. He has experience in the private, public and third sectors, notably becoming the first non-academic dean of Henley Business School.

The Legal Services Board has rejected a call from its consumer panel to consider a centralised regime of financial protection for clients to replace what the panel called the “fragmented” nature of insurance and compensation arrangements across the different legal regulators.

The Bar Standards Board effectively killed the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA) today – six years after it was meant to come into force – by saying it was pulling out to go in a different direction to assure the quality of criminal advocates. QASA was originally meant to start in December 2011.

A “steady stream of disagreements” between legal regulators and representative bodies means the rules governing their relationships may need to be rewritten, the Legal Services Board said yesterday. The oversight regulator said it had been notified of 30 disputes over the past three years.

A one-time member of the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives has been jailed for providing unregulated immigration advice. Prince Adewale Adeola, 53, was sentenced to five months’ imprisonment at Woolwich Crown Court, having pleaded guilty to 11 charges.

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.