The Legal Services Board (LSB) has initiated a consultation on its draft business plan and budget for 2024/25, aiming to enhance regulation’s role in shaping a legal services market aligned with societal needs. The plan focuses on strengthening direct oversight of regulators, ensuring their effective performance and resilience in conducting regulatory reviews. Anticipating resource demands,…
Legal Services Board calls for consumers to be put at the heart of regulation
On the 29th of March the Legal Services Board (LSB) launched a consumer-focused strategy for legal services in England and Wales, which included a call for all regulators in England and Wales to collaborate to reshape legal services to better meet society’s needs. It called for action from all regulators from its position as the…
Law Society of Scotland publishes a new strategy to improve regulatory process and enhance competition in the legal sector
The Law Society of Scotland’s Regulatory Committee has revealed a new two-year strategy, which is focused on improving regulatory processes, enhancing competition in Scotland’s legal sector and ensuring robust consumer protections. The Regulatory Committee is independent from the Law Society’s Council (the governing body of the Society), and is responsible for overseeing a number of…
Legal Services Board annual regulatory performance review pushes improvements in performance and governance
The Legal Services Board (LSB) has published annual reports on the performance of the eight legal services regulatory bodies. Each one of the eight providers regulates a different type of lawyer in England and Wales, and has control over its day to day operations. However under the Legal Services Act 2007 (the Act), they have…
UK Competition and Markets Authority review of legal services market
The UK Competition and Markets Authority has released an updated report based on its initial findings on the legal services market published in 2016. The report recognises the improvements that have been made in increasing the transparency of the price, service and quality of legal services, but said there was more to do to increase…
Regulatory Abdication in Practice
Abstract “Meta-regulation” refers to deliberate efforts to induce private firms to create their own internal regulations—a regulatory strategy sometimes referred to as “management-based regulation” or even “regulation of self-regulation.” Meta-regulation is often presented as a flexible alternative to traditional “command-and-control” regulation. But does meta-regulation actually work? In her recent book, Meta-Regulation in Practice: Beyond Normative Views…
State Bar of California publishes 2017 Annual Discipline Report
In 2017 the State Bar and its prosecutorial arm, the Office of Chief Trial Counsel, implemented a number of comprehensive structural and process re-engineering reforms designed to improve public protection for all California residents. Given the ambitious nature of these reforms, key measures from the report indicate a decline in short-term performance as compared to…