Legal Services Board

The government has today rejected the Legal Services Board’s (LSB) recommendation that will-writing become a reserved legal activity. There had been near-unanimous support from legal and consumer groups for the move.

The influence of lawyers and professional bodies on their frontline regulators is the biggest risk to independent regulation in the law, the strategy director of the Legal Services Board has claimed. Crispin Passmore said a combination of factors led him to “worry how independent regulation actually is”.

The row over Legal Services Board-commissioned research that recommended removal of the cab-rank rule stepped up a further notch yesterday after one of the academics who conducted it hit back at the critiques published by the Bar Council and Bar Standards Board.

The status quo over reserved and unreserved legal activities is unsustainable and the answer may be for all legal advice to be regulated, the chief executive of the Legal Services Board has suggested.

A proposed statutory duty on frontline regulators to consider economic growth must not be used to probe the business plans of new entrants to the market or block “risky business models”, the Legal Services Board has cautioned.

The Legal Services Board is to keep the performance of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in issuing alternative business structure licences under scrutiny, it has emerged. We have discovered that in January it issued a statutory notice requiring the SRA to provide information.

A new outcomes-focused approach to becoming a chartered legal executive, which could also cut the time it takes to qualify by reducing the ‘time served’ aspect of the process, has been approved by the Legal Services Board.

The Legal Services Board (LSB) has hit back at its critics, accusing frontline legal regulators of being “uncomfortable” with the language of competition and failing to examine the impact of regulation on the market.

The Legal Services Board has criticised the Solicitors Regulation Authority for restricting liberalisation of the rule that previously prevented local authorities from charging charities and voluntary organisations for legal services.

Barristers can now speak to the press about their cases, after the Bar’s Code of Conduct was changed. The end to the rule prohibiting barristers from expressing personal opinion publicly in relation to their work finally brings them in line with solicitor-advocates.

The Legal Services Board has criticised the Bar Standards Board’s failure to apply the cab-rank rule to public access work and said this omission will reduce the impact of rule changes that widen the scope for barristers dealing directly with clients.

The prospect of chartered legal executives setting up their own law firms moved closer to reality yesterday after their regulator submitted an application for the full range of independent practice rights. It has won immediate support from a Conservative MP.

Banning referral fees in personal injury may have unintended consequences that will be worse than the current situation, Legal Services Board chairman David Edmonds told MPs yesterday. He also said the current regulatory regime could move rapidly to a single over-arching regulator.

Just one in eight small businesses believe that lawyers provide a cost-effective solution to legal problems, new research has found. The finding suggests far larger unmet legal need among SMEs than among the general public.

There is “a compelling moral and economic case” for the Legal Services Board to pursue initiatives such as an NHS Direct-style telephone service to help people find the legal advice they need, its consumer adviser has urged.