Shah: Changed risk landscape
The Legal Services Board (LSB) will focus “more sharply on fewer but more clearly defined priorities” in a three-year strategy to be launched later this year, its new chair has said.
Monisha Shah said the legal sector looked “quite different” from the one in which the existing Reshaping Legal Services strategy, due to run until March 2031, was developed.
“We are several years on from the Covid-19 pandemic, AI has advanced rapidly, and the unregulated sector has grown exponentially.
“The impact of the Post Office Horizon scandal and the failures of Axiom Ince, SSB Law and PM Law have reinforced the importance of effective regulatory oversight and the urgent need to keep pace with changing risks and opportunities for consumers.”
Back in 2021, the oversight regulator set a vision for 2031 [1] that would see unmet legal need “greatly reduced” and the outcomes and experience of legal services “much more equal across the population”.
Changes to the regulation of lawyers – including altering the list of reserved legal activities and extending protections for consumers using unregulated providers – were also part of the strategy.
An assessment of the first five years [2], published at the end of last year, conceded that a legal market that achieved fairer outcomes for both the public and the profession “is far from being realised”.
Ms Shah, who became chair of the LSB in April, said the new strategy would take into account the “changed risk landscape”.
In a blog for the LSB website, she said: “We will focus more sharply on fewer but more clearly defined priorities and on the role of regulation in protecting consumers, enabling innovation and promoting growth in the sector.
“This will mean that each of the nine regulatory objectives will attract different levels of our attention over the next three years and beyond, depending on the most critical risks to address or opportunities to embrace at that time. We will consult on the draft strategy later this year.”
Ms Shah predicted that much of the LSB’s energy would be directed to regulatory oversight – it said recently [3] that it would target effort on those regulators that need more attention – and ensuring the regulatory framework “both protects consumers and enables innovation in the public interest”.
The LSB’s “horizon-scanning function” would be developed to “identify risks to consumers and act before harm materialises”.
Ms Shah is also a member of the judicial and legal diversity board, launched in May [4] by deputy prime minister David Lammy and the Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr, while the LSB is also one of the legal regulators involved in the government’s new AI Growth Lab [5], providing a regulatory sandbox for AI systems.
In April, the LSB reversed its plan [6] to reduce its budget and instead approved a small increase, amounting to an extra £1.79 on every authorised lawyer’s practising fees. The total budget is £5.8m.