Our September Board meeting coincided with a special event on the uses and regulation of AI. I’d like to begin by thanking Clifford Chance, who generously hosted both. In this month’s blog, I share some highlights from those discussions, as well as other recent developments at the LSB.
Recruitment of a new Chair
The Ministry of Justice has now opened recruitment for the next Chair of the LSB. This is an important moment in the Board’s journey, and a fascinating role for the right person.
The deadline is 11pm on 5 October, and details can be found on the Ministry of Justice website.
LawTech event at Clifford Chance
At our latest ‘Reshaping legal services’ event – at Clifford Chance, as mentioned above – we explored the fast-evolving role of AI in legal services.
We began with three presentations:
- Clifford Chance on AI regulation across different jurisdictions, the importance of diversity in developer teams, and the tools the firm is currently using.
- Citizens Advice on how AI is helping their advisers to access information more efficiently, as well as the safeguards they’re putting in place.
- Garfield AI with a live demonstration of how their tool can accelerate and simplify the process of recovering small debt payments.
This was followed by a lively Q&A, in which I was particularly impressed by the thoughtful questions from law students in attendance.
The slides from the event are available on our blog. Maybe we’ll visit your area soon: to keep up-to-date with these events, sign-up to our newsletter.
Take-aways from our September Board meeting
This month’s Board meeting was paired with our annual strategy session, so I’ll reflect on the two together. In both, we were focussed on how the LSB can continue to work for the benefit of the public and consumers in a complex and changing environment.
The Government has put out a clear call for regulatory efficiency to support economic growth. For us, it is not simply a question of more or less regulation, but how we – and those we oversee – can achieve smarter, more effective regulation.
Our task is to make sure that regulation can support economic growth while it also protects consumers. Some of the topics we discussed included:
- The LSB’s new horizon-scanning function, which we’re calling ‘surveillance of harms’. Currently in development, this aims to improve how we spot emerging risks across the sector and how different organisations share information about these risks.
- Our oversight role, reflecting on constructive discussions in recent weeks with both the Bar Standards Board on its voluntary undertakings and the Solicitors Regulation Authority on the directions we issued to it after the Axiom Ince report.
- Our policy priorities, including a forthcoming consultation on how regulators can better promote diversity within the profession, and our forthcoming policy on upholding professional ethical duties. We’ve recently published a blog about the feedback we received through our consultation on the latter, take a look here.
We’ll soon consult on our next business plan, which I anticipate will mark a phase of consolidation for the LSB. We’ll look to maintain and embed the strong oversight we’ve pursued in recent years, while advancing our most impactful policy priorities.
The Legal Services Consumer Panel also reminded us of the importance of keeping the consumer experience central to our decisions. Alongside this, we reviewed our planning and prioritisation processes, including a forthcoming update to the State of Legal Services report.
I look forward to reporting on our progress in future blogs.
New office for the LSB
Please note that we have officially moved out of the Rookery and into our new offices at the following address: Legal Services Board, 2nd Floor, 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ