The Bar Standards Board (BSB) of England and Wales has responded to the Legal Services Board statement on ongoing competence. The response comes with an action plan for ensuring the competence of barristers. Currently the BSB employs a number of measures to ensure competence including: The Professional Statement, which describes the knowledge, skills and aptitude that…
American Bar Association propose amendments to Model Rules of Professional Conduct
The Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility and Committee on Professional Regulation has produced a third discussion draft of possible amendments to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. These possible changes aim to clarify lawyer’s obligations on client due diligence. This comment period has been influenced by the previous two drafts and the public comments…
The great disruption: How machine intelligence will transform the role of lawyers in the delivery of legal services
Law is an information technology—a code that regulates social life. In our age, the machinery of information technology is growing exponentially in power, not only in hardware, but also in the software capacity of the programs that run on computers. As a result, the legal profession faces a great disruption. Information technology has already had…
Lawyer Wellbeing as a Crisis of the Profession
The legal profession is in the throes of a mental health crisis. State bars across the country continue to be rocked by the tragic loss of their lawyers to suicide and accidental drug overdose. Recent studies have also shed further light on the severity and scale of lawyers’ long-recognized struggles with depression, anxiety, substance abuse,…
How Should We License Lawyers?
During the summer of 2020, anger and frustration about lawyer licensing practices boiled over. The bar exam had always imposed economic and psychological burdens on test takers, but the rise of a pandemic added an additional hazard: exposure to a dangerous virus. Some states continued the in-person traditional exam despite the health risks, but others…
The Politics of Lawyer Regulation: The Case of Malpractice Insurance
This article examines the politics of lawyer regulation and considers why some states will adopt lawyer regulation that protects the public, when others will not. It uses the debates over how to regulate uninsured lawyers as a lens through which to examine the question. Clients often cannot recover damages from uninsured lawyers who commit malpractice,…
The Victoria Legal Services Board in Australia has published its Gender Equality Action Plan 2022-2025
The Victoria Legal Services Board has published its Gender Equality Action Plan 2022-2025, with a view to challenging gender inequality within the organisation. The key focus areas, actions and measures identified in the GEAP align with objectives in VLSB+C’s Corporate Plan 2022-24, particularly in the People, Technology and Governance section of the plan. That section…
HM Treasury releases Anti-money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism: Supervision Report 2020-2022
HM Treasury has released a report : Anti-money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism: Supervision 2020-2022. The report, which was published in December 2022, reports on the activity and performance of legal pubic body supervisors in tackling anti-money laundering. The key findings in the report are as follows: inadequate documented policies and procedures inadequate…
The Legal Services Board of England and Wales has published its annual assessment of performance of the legal regulators it oversees
The Legal Services Board of England & Wales has published its annual performance assessment of the eight legal regulators it oversees. Each regulatory body regulates different types of lawyers and service providers, however, all of the bodies have the same obligations under the Legal Services Act 2007. Each regulator was assessed on five categories: Regulatory…
The New Zealand Law Society publishes its Regulatory Strategy 2022-2025 ‘Navigating the Future’
The strategy aligns with the findings and decisions from the Independent Review of the statutory framework for lawyers, which has been commissioned to examine the regulation and representation of legal services in Aotearoa New Zealand, this includes the structure and functions of the Law Society. The key shifts made in the new regulatory strategy are:…