The SRA has appointed Kaplan as the assessment organisation to develop and run the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE). Selected following a rigorous, year-long process, Kaplan provides education, training and assessment across professional services, including in law, financial services, accountancy and banking. It has direct experience of assessment within the legal sector in England and Wales…
Regulating Law Firms from the Inside: The Role of Compliance Officers for Legal Practice in England and Wales
Following the Legal Services Act 2007, which permitted the delivery of legal services through Alternative Business Structures (ABS), the Solicitors Regulation Authority required all regulated legal service firms to appoint Compliance Officers for Legal Practice (COLPs). COLPs are charged with taking reasonable steps to ensure that firms comply with their obligations, which entails interpreting what…
The Legal Profession in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Since the 1979 Revolution, the clerical regime in Iran has been limiting the legal profession’s autonomy by preventing members of the Iranian Bar Association (IBA) from freely electing their Board of Directors and by establishing a new body of lawyers — legal advisors of the judiciary — to contest the IBA’s professional monopoly. Clerics have…
Impact evaluation of Solicitors Regulation Authority’s regulatory reform programme
The SRA has delivered significant regulatory reform to the legal market in recent years, key developments have included the introduction of: Alternative Business Structures (ABSs) in 2012 Multi-Disciplinary Practices (MDPs) in 2014 the reformed separate business rule in 2015 To help the SRA understand the early impact of these changes, including identifying evidence of any…
Update on legal and regulatory reforms in Nigeria
Back in September 2017 we reported on the Nigerian Bar Association’s legal and regulatory reform objectives. Since then a number of initiatives have been undertaken. The NBA President, Abubakar Balarabe Mahmoud, recently attended a meeting with the Body of Senior Advocates of Nigeria (BOSAN) and presented them with a number of documents for review: An executive summary…
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…
Report on regulation and productivity in Europe’s professional services markets
Europe has had a persistent low growth problem over much of the past decade, exacerbated by the severe economic contraction triggered by the financial crisis, when EU GDP fell by 4.5% in 2009 alone. Since then, the European economy has been characterised by low growth rates, stubborn unemployment and stagnant productivity. According to European Commission…
IMF working paper: Structural reform in Germany
This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the macroeconomic, distributional, and fiscal effects of three reform proposals for Germany: i) a reduction in the social security tax in the low-wage sector, ii) a publicly financed expansion of full-day child care and full-day schooling, and iii) the further deregulation of the professional services sector. The analysis…
Legal Services: removing barriers to competition. Consultation on proposals to make amendments to the Legal Services Act 2007
This consultation sets out the UK government’s proposals to amend the regulatory framework for legal services to reduce barriers to the licensing of, and regulatory burdens on, legal service businesses that are licensed as Alternative Business Structures, bringing the legislative framework for these businesses more in line with that for other legal service businesses. Link…
OECD: Protecting and promoting competition in response to ‘disruptive’ innovations in legal services
This document was prepared by the OECD Secretariat to serve as an issues paper at the 61th meeting of the OECD Working Party No. 2 on Competition and Regulation (13 June 2016). This paper introduces recent disruptive innovations in legal services markets, as well as the overarching trends giving rise to them. The role for…