Building on the momentum of the Reshaping Legal Services conference
We started our Board meeting on 18 October 2022 by reflecting on our first Reshaping Legal Services conference last week. The theme was ‘A diverse public deserves a strong, ethical and diverse profession.’ Thank you to everyone who attended in person and online and contributed to the lively debates. We were delighted to be joined by many people from across the profession, including regulators, lawyers, the judiciary, academia, students, and consumer groups. There was a determination to reshape legal services to ensure people from all backgrounds can enter the profession and progress and a commitment to ensuring the sector better meets the needs of the society we serve. We must now harness that energy and turn it into action.
The Board agreed that it was important that the conference leads to tangible change. We are also devising an action plan to identify the projects and initiatives we will take forward and where regulation can drive change. We will continue to engage broadly across the sector to understand what others are doing and where we can support them. We look forward to sharing the details and impact on the Reshaping Legal Services platform.
Register for updates if you would like to join us at next year’s conference.
Engaging with the sector across England and Wales
Feeling energised from seeing the impact of bringing everyone together at the conference, the Board considered plans for increasing our engagement with people across the sector in the regions and Wales. We were delighted to be joined at the conference by the Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution in the Welsh Government, Mick Antoniw, and we look forward to forging stronger links with the legal sector in Wales. We will continue to bring different parts of the profession together to ensure we hear and understand a range of views, experiences and evidence as we deliver our strategy for the sector.
Our rule of law project: ensuring high-quality services and strong professional ethics
A key takeaway from the annual conference is that the whole sector must acknowledge the need to improve and promote standards of professional ethics. The Board agreed that there needed to be a fundamental cultural shift to effect change in this area. This is vital to securing consumer trust and confidence.
Our rule of law project will look at the role of regulation in supporting the rule of law and ensuring a sufficiently strong connection between the legal profession, individual lawyers and legal businesses and their underlying public purpose of upholding the rule of law. We are also exploring ethical structures and what more, if anything, could be done to better promote the rule of law within the sector.
The Board noted the importance of engaging broadly with the regulators, lawyers, and others on this work. This project will impact all lawyers, whether in-house or at a small or large firm.
To help ensure the project is consumer-focused, we will also test the public’s expectations around professional ethics. We will consult our ‘public panel’, which enables us to hear the views of consumers and people who need legal services.
Bolstering the regulatory infrastructure: Regulatory Performance Framework Review
Our regulatory performance framework is one of the tools we use to hold regulators to account for their performance and is central to our ambition to encourage regulators to take ownership of the regulatory objectives.
Following a consultation earlier in the year, we considered an analysis of the responses and the proposed changes. We will publish the revised framework later this month, and it will come into effect on 1 January 2023.
Mapping unregulated legal services and improving access to justice for consumers
The unregulated sector plays an essential role in widening access to legal services, and in our Reshaping Legal Services strategy, we committed to building a better understanding of the sector and any risks to consumers.
The Board considered the findings of our Mapping the Unregulated Sector research. There is a lack of evidence from our research that there is a scale of consumer detriment that would warrant immediate changes to the reserved legal activities in the Act.
We will consider further evidence as it becomes available. In the meantime, we will conduct a first-principles analysis of the existing reserved legal activities in the Act to consider whether they are sufficiently aligned with risks in the legal services market. That may in turn lead to further focused evidence gathering.
Ensuring adequate complaints-management systems are in place for consumers
It is important consumers are able to access effective redress when things go wrong. This is vital to public trust and confidence in legal services. Complaints about service must initially be made to the legal service provider or firm, and the Board considered desk research on the challenges with these first-tier complaints and how we might address them. To provide better outcomes for complaints and the profession more broadly, we want to see greater collaboration between regulators and the sector to ensure there is a consistent, high-quality approach to complaints handling across the sector. It must also be easier for people to make a complaint and follow the process. We will produce new Requirements and Guidance for consideration in early 2023.
The next Board meeting is on 29 November 2022.