The Law Society has accused the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) of seeking to create a ‘Wild West marketplace’ in legal services
Its concerns centre on two SRA consultations published last week, ‘Looking to the future: phase two of our Handbook reforms’ and ‘Looking to the future: better information, more choice’.
The Law Society said it was ‘gravely concerned’ about the first consultation, which would cut 300 pages from the Handbook, including the ‘qualified to supervise’ rule, and free up solicitors to provide reserved legal services on a freelance basis. Law Society president Joe Egan said: ‘A new tier of solicitors, working in unregulated outfits, wouldn’t have to have the same insurance, wouldn’t pay into the solicitors compensation fund and wouldn’t inevitably afford their clients legal professional privilege. A further new class of solicitor would freelance, with neither a firm over their head nor the badge of sole practitioner. Removal of the rules which prevent solicitors establishing their own firms immediately after they qualify could put vulnerable clients with complex legal problems in the hands of inexperienced, unsupervised lawyers.’
Egan also hit out at the second consultation, which proposes mandatory publication of information on pricing, service and regulatory matters. It was counter-intuitive, he said, that regulated firms be forced to publish ‘reams of information’ while unregulated firms would not.
The SRA has declined to comment until 20 December, when the consultations end. Speaking ahead of their launch, however, Paul Philip, SRA chief executive, said legal services need to be more accessible because most people and small businesses cannot afford them, as the Competition and Markets Authority reported in 2016.
‘Part of the solution has to be to remove unnecessary rules and regulations and increase openness and competition,’ he said.
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