A tailored Society

Following the response to the ‘Have your say’ consultation, Janet Paraskeva outlines how the Law Society intends to change to meet the needs of its members

My last column reported the excellent response to the ‘Have your say’ consultation of the entire profession on the future of the Law Society. Having now had time to analyse the results in detail, it is clear the 19,000 responses were broadly representative of the profession in terms of gender and ethnicity and in terms of practice type – private practice, in-house and government.


This means that the detailed findings will be a good guide to how the Law Society can best organise itself to meet the needs of all the profession, though the fact that older members were over-represented compared to their younger colleagues, is a clear message about the need to engage differently with younger solicitors.


So what do the results say? They tell us that representing the views of solicitors to the government, regulators, consumer groups and others is by far the most important function of the Law Society in the view of its members. More than 80% of respondents identified this as a key role.


Having separated our regulatory and consumer complaints functions, fulfilling this demand will be much easier; we can, and will, act unambiguously in the interests of our members. One example is our lobbying on the imminent Legal Services Bill, when we will focus on the need for a light-touch approach to the oversight of regulation, demonstrable independence from government, and the clear separation of consumer redress issues (to be dealt with by a future office for legal complaints) and conduct issues, which should be the responsibility of the Law Society and other front-line regulators.


The survey results also show that certain key services are valued right across the profession. Ethics advice is by far and away the single most highly valued service. One-third of you said that it was the most important service to you. Some 14% of you placed the Gazette in first place. The practice advice service, training and on-line information services came third, fourth and fifth respectively.


In all cases, we will be looking at how we deliver those services in new and different ways, and how we tailor them – respondents favoured services being tailored according to their specialist areas of law and the types of practice they work in. But there may also be some things that we do now that, in the future, we will put much less resource into, or we might even stop doing them altogether.


It was also clear from the findings that service provision will need to acknowledge the diversity of the profession. In-house solicitors highlighted training and on-line library services as important to them more often than did their colleagues in private practice. Perhaps not surprisingly, students and trainee solicitors are particularly interested in careers advice and training. The future Law Society will need to be designed with a close eye on what solicitors across this diverse profession need.


So we have heard loud and clear from the profession, both in last year’s market research and through the ‘Have your say’ consultation. But we will go on involving solicitors as the redesign takes place.


Last week, the Law Society Council used the consultation responses to determine the strategic scope and purpose for the new Society and to steer more detailed work on the future design. This will provide the overall framework for how the Society operates and the services that it should offer to represent best the profession’s interests.


The final stage in determining what the Law Society should look like will take place in July, when the council will be determining the outline shape of the future organisation. And that is when the real challenge starts. The Society will need to show the profession that it can not only listen but also respond to our members by truly becoming the valuable national representative body that solicitors need.


We are moving quickly in implementing far-reaching change for the long-term future of the Law Society. That change is already beginning. We’ve put our non-regulatory work through a rigorous reprioritisation exercise to make sure that what we are doing in 2006 is closely aligned with what the profession is telling us it wants from its national representative body.


As a result, we are beginning a significant rebalancing of our work to ensure that we are better focused on delivering those activities and services that you tell us you particularly value. The profession’s needs change over time, so we have been able to reduce, or even stop, some things that you have less need for now and we are channelling the resources we have saved into those areas where you want us to do more. And we are keeping the practising certificate fee down as we work to deliver a national body that supports solicitors. You should start to see the effects of that soon.