Read our interview with Gary Horswell for the latest on the solicitors’ PII market
Everyone knows that the insurance market looks a lot different to the ‘good times’ of just a couple of years ago.With the global economy facing a severe shock, we wanted to know what impact that is going to have on solicitors’ professional indemnity insurance. We are already seeing anecdotal evidence of roughly 25% increases on premium across the board.
So we chatted to Gary Horswell for the inside track.
‘All providers of legal services should be registered and regulated’, says Mayson report
Stephen Mayson, Honorary Professor of Law at UCL, has submitted his final report on legal regulation to the Lord Chancellor.The report, ‘Reforming Legal Services: Regulation beyond the echo chambers’, makes the following recommendations:
- All ‘providers’ of legal services, including ‘law-tech’, and whether qualified or not, should be subject to registration and regulation.
- Establishing a single regulator of legal services (the Legal Services Regulation Authority) – rather than the current ten front line regulators – to ensure a consistent approach across the professions. Low risk services would require registration only; higher risk areas would also require regulation.
- The reserved legal activities should be reviewed and replaced.
- The single regulator should maintain a public register of providers.
- Clients should have access to minimum protections, such as recourse to PII and the Ombudsman.
- All legal professional titles should have statutory protection.
- Professional bodies should continue to have the ability to require higher standards of their members than those imposed by regulation.
Why is it important?
These full legal services reviews come along once every fifteen years or so. Remember Clementi?
Although the government may currently be looking the other way, don’t be surprised to see elements being pushed in the next five years. Particularly as more law-tech solutions are adopted by clients.
I’m not sure about a single regulator, but the review of the reserved activities is well-overdue. That step alone could result in greater protections for the public.
Having a largely unregulated legal services market does not make a whole lot of sense from a competition point of view either.
Practice notes and guidance
SRA
- Updated: Transparency in price and service
- Coronavirus: Help with common compliance queries
The Law Society
- Conflicts of interests in conveyancing
- Regulation and compliance in property practice
- VAT treatment of disbursements and expenses
- UCL review of legal services regulation
- DAC 6 and legal professional privilege
Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)
Disciplinary decisions
- Kulvinder Kooner (trainee) banned from profession for falsifying an LPC certificate
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