Trust and Transparency – Friday 5 October 2018
Synopsis
To present the challenges presented by the expectation of members of the public who use legal services around the trust in the way in which those services are regulated and the transparency allied to that including the challenges presented in the legal services market around transparency of price.
Speakers
Neil Buckley is Chief Executive of the Legal Services Board for England and Wales – he was appointed as their Chief CEO in January 2016 and is also a member of their board. He was previously Director of Investigations at Ofcom. Neil is a solicitor who has a Master’s degree in Regulation from the London School of Economics
Rebecca Marsh was appointed Chief Ombudsman at the Legal Ombudsman Service in January 2018. Prior to joining LeO, she was Deputy Ombudsman and Executive Director of Operations and Investigations at the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. She has an extensive career in complaints handling and ombudsman services
Philip Yelland is the Executive Director of Regulation at the Law Society of Scotland and prior to holding that role was Director of the Complaints Investigation team at the Society, whom he joined in 1990. He is a qualified solicitor.
Michal Masior is a member of the bar council in Warsaw, and PhD candidate in Warsaw School of Economics. He has co-authored two reports for the European Commission on the effects of the deregulation of professions and the quality of legal services and also co-authored and edited a report on the regulation of legal services in the selected countries (in Europe and the U.S.). He is currently writing a thesis is about the economic effects of the regulation of legal services.
Why is this session of particular interest and to whom?
This session will be of interest to those who are regulators and face the challenges of maintaining public confidence in the work that they do – including the challenge where the regulator may also be a representative body and to consider issues around transparency in connection with that regulation e.g. publication of disciplinary decisions, rules around price transparency and the like.
What particularly do you hope to explore in this session? Any specific questions you hope to answer?
We hope to explore this from the different perspectives of an overarching regulator (the Legal Services Board), a regulator dealing only with consumer complaints (the Legal Ombudsman Service) and a professional body that regulates and represents (the Law Society of Scotland).
What do you hope to achieve with this session?
A lively debate leading to getting views around how trust can best be achieved and to see what views there are on the issue of price transparency for legal services and how best to achieve that.
What is the setting of your session?
An initial presentation by each speaker – maximum 5-7 minutes followed by a discussion.
inform the content/preparation?
It would be good if a couple of questions could be posed to the community/those who are attending:
- Have there been any challenges to your regulation in the public interest in the last five years and if so how did you go about demonstrating why you could be trusted and what you did to ensure the public interest was always at the forefront of your regulation
- Is price transparency an issue for you now; if it is how are you tackling it – have you reached a view about how to encourage/require it