News

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Every chambers, “from the most vulnerable of publicly funded sets to the most smug and complacent of specialist, privately funded sets”, needs to prepare for change, with the Bar’s ProcureCo model opening up “hundreds of millions of pounds of work” to barristers, the chairman of the Bar Council said on Saturday. Addressing the annual Bar conference, Nicholas Green QC also expressed his “moral qualms” about the number of students trying to enter the Bar compared to the number of available pupillages, and about how many of those who fail to find vocational training are instead creating a “paralegal workforce”, saying the aptitude test being introduced for bar students may not be enough.

The government is set to take forward Lord Young’s proposals to extend the road traffic claims process to all low-value personal injury and clinical negligence cases, while the Jackson reforms are imminent, the Ministry of Justice confirmed today.

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) should be the sole regulator for advocacy, the chairman of the Legal Services Board has said. Speaking at a BSB-organised session at Saturday’s Bar Council annual conference in London, David Edmonds said he agreed with the Master of Rolls, Lord Neuberger, who had earlier told the conference that the number of regulators “all regulating [advocacy] is ridiculous” and that if the 2007 Legal Services Act “does not lead to activity-based regulation, it will have failed”.

After all the predictions of solicitors’ professional indemnity insurance (PII) premiums going through the roof, figures from the Solicitors Regulation Authority show a 15% fall across the profession for 2010/11, back to pre-recession levels. However, there has been a massive 57% jump in the number of firms in the assigned risks pool.

Legal services is one of the markets most failing UK consumers, with bankers and insurers among those doing a better job, pioneering European Union research has revealed. Lawyers are just ahead of second-hand car salesmen, however. The Legal Services Consumer Panel has branded the results “embarrassing” and said lawyers will have to up their game significantly if they are to resist competition from alternative business structures.

Is it time for solicitors to panic? The significance of the announcement that the AA and Saga have launched legal services websites is less in what they are offering but in the fact that they are the latest big brands to see potential in the legal market.

The second in a series of extracts from Climate Change, a report on the impact of the Legal Services Act published by accountants Baker Tilly, looks at the growing role of outsourcing both front and back-office work, and how far it could go.

The Legal Ombudsman service needs to work out the limits of its jurisdiction “and quickly”, as new business models emerge, chief ombudsman Adam Sampson has said. Mr Sampson said that with the pace of legal services reform accelerating and the legal services market “rapidly moving away from a reliance on the high street solicitor” and towards new providers entering the market “with very different business models”, it is very important to consumers that LeO is clear about what is and is not within its jurisdiction.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and Office of Fair Trading (OFT) have each pledged around £30,000 to support the Legal Services Board’s (LSB) research into the will-writing market, Legal Futures can reveal. However, the Law Society has declined to contribute, citing concerns over the impact its involvement could have on how the impartiality of the research is viewed.

The Law Society has begun laying down the red lines beyond which it will not be able to support alternative business structures (ABSs), Legal Futures can reveal. The society’s regulatory affairs board has highlighted a variety of issues that it expects to see addressed if it is to judge the arrangements for ABSs satisfactory, including effective controls on the fitness to own of prospective external owners.