The highly anticipated denouement of the Independent Review of Legal Services, which was first launched in October 2018, was published on the 11th June. The 340-page report which has been informed by a number of working papers, as well as an interim report, which has been fed into by a variety of actors in the legal sector is entitled Reforming legal services: Regulation beyond the echo chambers.
Professor Mayson has suggested in the report that all providers of legal services, should be registered and regulated by a single regulator, whether they are legally qualified or not. He suggested that regulation should move from the regulation of lawyers to the regulation of legal services, with different levels of regulation being applied depending on the public risk inherent in the work. By extension, this would mean that traditional legal qualifications would no longer be the sole entry point into the profession.
The report has been submitted to the Lord Chancellor, however, the Ministry of Justice in the UK has suggested that they currently do not plan to review the Legal Services Act 2007. Professor Mayson has therefore suggested shorter-term measures that can be introduced, as he feels that action must come sooner rather than later.
Professor Mayson suggested that especially as demand has moved online, the public are increasingly unaware of their rights in relation to regulated professionals, whilst lawyers are operating under a system where only a small percentage of their work is covered under the regulatory regimes they are supposed to work under. “The conclusion of this review is that the regulatory framework should better reflect the legitimate needs and expectations of the more than 90% of the population for whom it is not currently designed,” he wrote. The new framework would also allow for new provides such as lawtech providers to act within a regulated sector.
Professor Mayson also described the current arrangement of 10 front-line regulators plus an oversight regulator as “cumbersome”, and recommended replacing it with a single, independent regulator – the Legal Services Regulation Authority (LSRA). “The requirement for flexibility, consistency, coherence and coordination across regulation within the legal services sector necessarily leads to a single regulator,” the report said.
Download a full copy of the report (PDF).
The response from regulators has been mixed with CILEx (read the CILEx response) and the Association of Costs Lawyers (read the Association of Costs Lawyers response) backing professor Mayson’s report, and the LSB (read the LSB response) saying that they will carefully consider his recommendations in relation to their ongoing work in reforming legal regulation. Whilst the Law Society has suggested that given the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, now is not the time to discuss reforms.
Also see the article at Legal Futures for a further breakdown of the regulatory responses.