Tag Archives: rule of law

“Are you proud to be a lawyer?”

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Once, this was not a difficult question to answer.  When I became a barrister in 1977, my answer would have been immediate and unequivocal.  Like many of my generation, I was the first in the family to go to university; and then to gain a legal qualification was a matter of great pride.

But, almost 50 years on, things are different.  Lawyers are no longer held in such high esteem (either collectively or, often, individually); media stories abound of lawyers who are said to have ‘crossed an ethical line’; and the public brush of concern tars everyone.  I find the question more difficult (and, to some degree, uncomfortable) these days.

So is current sentiment just an enhanced reflection of longstanding animosity towards the profession collectively?  Is this tide irreversible?  I’d like to think so, but it may not be easy. Continue reading →

Regulation: from infection to inflection point

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Here is a fascinating podcast: a conversation between Jordan Furlong (guest) and Professor Mike Madison of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law (host) on the future of law, re-regulation, access to justice, and the rule of law. Over many years, Jordan has perfected the gift of identifying nails in the legal services sector and then hitting each of them firmly on the head. This episode has a good number of those nails. In this post, I pick up on some of the themes it explores.

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Re-thinking legal services regulation

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My interim report for the Independent Review of Legal Services Regulation in England & Wales is published today (available here).  This post is extracted from it.

While the reforms of the Legal Services Act 2007 have been mainly beneficial overall, that legislation might best be characterised as an incomplete step towards restructuring legal services regulation.

For reasons that are understandable, it did not fully follow through on some key elements of the regulatory structure.  These include: review and reform of the reserved legal activities (those few activities that must be provided by lawyers); the known regulatory gap (as a consequence of which the non-reserved activities of lawyers are regulated, but those of non-lawyers can legally be provided but cannot be regulated – to the potential detriment of consumers); and the separation of regulation from professional representative interests.

This lack of follow-through has led to increasing challenges to the integrity of the regulatory framework as the legal sector has evolved and developed since 2007.

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