News

---

The Competition and Market Authority was right to conclude that there needs to be more transparency of price and service quality in the legal market, the Legal Services Board said today. But this has to be combined with both short and long-term regulatory reform.

Law firms of the future are likely to succeed by integrating non-lawyer specialists, such as project managers, into their businesses and collaborating with technology companies, it has been predicted. The profession also needs to train “ethically minded legal professionals who are equipped to keep modernising how they deliver legal services”.

Lawyers are still failing in their regulatory duty to tell clients about the right to complain to the Legal Ombudsman (LeO), its research has found. When asked how they first heard about the scheme, only 20% of 3,680 consumers who had been in contact with the LeO said it was from their lawyer.

“Many of my solicitor friends are insanely jealous” that the new arrangements for licensed conveyancers’ professional indemnity insurance include free run-off cover, one practitioner said in a survey that showed widespread satisfaction with the regime.

The government’s proposals to clamp down on tax avoidance by targeting advisers with sanctions if HMRC successfully challenges a scheme blur the line between evasion and avoidance, and “threaten the rule of law”, according to a prominent tax lawyer.

The traditional law firm partnership structure is still dominant in the profession but the arrival of alternative business structures has disrupted the status quo and may eventually become the norm in high-volume legal services, according to research.

A claims management company in Manchester has become the latest to be slapped down by the Advertising Standards Authority after failing to make clear to potential customers that the amount of money they could receive was before its 33% fee was deducted.

Law firms should be at the forefront of the fight against modern slavery, both in terms of their own impact as businesses and advising clients on meeting their human rights obligations, the Law Society has urged.

A partner has been struck off after forging a divorce client’s decree absolute, and misappropriating more than £200,000 from clients to hide his inactivity on other matters. The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal said his motivation was “to conceal his professional failings in respect of other clients”.

The body representing chartered legal executives has called on the profession to end discrimination against lawyers who have qualified through non-university routes and open up the senior judiciary to those entered the law by alternative means.