Not every Board meeting involves momentous decisions; some are just as important for the steady guidance they provide to our ongoing work. Our June meeting was very much about making sure that key projects are progressing in the right direction and that our governance obligations are met.
We began by reviewing a draft of our Annual Report and Accounts for 2024/25. Our team continues to work closely with the external auditors and our Audit and Risk Committee to finalise the report before it is laid in Parliament.
State of Legal Services
Next, we turned our attention to a forthcoming update to our State of Legal Services report, last published in 2020.
The earlier report played an important role in forming the Reshaping Legal Services strategy, which set out nine sector-wide challenges. The forthcoming update will mark the halfway point of that ten-year strategy and will give an indication of the sector’s progress in meeting those challenges. It will help us all to assess how effectively legal services are meeting the needs of the public and how, in its second phase, the strategy should evolve to meet the current challenges meeting the sector.
Board members welcomed the encouraging signs of greater collaboration across the sector over the last five years, as well as the shared vision for change. We urged the executive team to explore how this momentum can be harnessed to continue to deliver measurable improvements during the next phase of the strategy, and to identify where particular actors are best placed to lead change.
Economic crime
From November 2024 to February 2025, we consulted on draft guidance to help regulators understand how to meet a new regulatory objective: to ‘promote the prevention and detection of economic crime’.
Following our careful analysis of the feedback, we have refined the guidance and prepared a summary of the responses we received. We will publish both of these in the near future. We are grateful to all those who contributed to this vital and developing area of regulation, seeking to ensure the legal sector plays its part in addressing the wide-ranging harms caused by economic crime.
Internal Governance Rules (IGR)
In 2019, we introduced new IGR to ensure and maintain independent regulation. The IGR provide for clear and effective separation of the regulatory functions from the representative functions of approved regulators. This is crucial to the integrity of legal services, giving confidence to consumers, providers and the public that legal services work in the public interest and support the rule of law.
In 2024, we asked the approved regulators and their regulatory bodies for their views on the IGR, as part of our planned evaluation 5 years after they came into effect. Although some concerns were raised, the overall response shows that the IGR are operating as intended. We thank the approved regulators and regulatory bodies for their insights; our evaluation will continue in due course.
Catherine Brown
Interim Chair of the LSB
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