The legal media are awash with stories about the changes that face the legal profession. These include the arrival of alternative business structures (ABSs) and the possible consequences for firms on the high street; the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s new handbook and Code of Conduct; the SRA’s approach to outcomes-focused regulation and risk; the upheaval in legal aid; and, more generally, the economic situation.

In the midst of all this talk of change – much of it, I acknowledge, generated by the SRA – I thought I should highlight the enduring values of the legal profession and explain what the SRA is doing to preserve these in the new environment brought about by the Legal Services Act (LSA) and market forces.

The 10 core principles set out in our new handbook – most notably the first six – are designed to preserve all that is best about the solicitors’ profession. They relate to proper independence from improper influence; the centrality of the rule of law; putting clients’ interests first; being scrupulously honest; and protecting your clients’ money. All these core principles, which have been the pride of the profession for generations, and upon which generations of clients have placed their confidence, are carried forward into the brave new world.

But our work to defend those values goes further than that. The LSA, far from producing a fully rationalised regulatory structure for legal services, in many respects produces an unhealthy hotchpotch of arrangements, with potential dangers for consumer protection. A part of that hotchpotch is the continuing nonsense of the definition of reserved legal activities. That nonsense – already evident in areas such as will-writing – will potentially be made worse with the advent of alternative business structures.

At present there are six ‘reserved legal activities’ set out under the LSA – that is activities which lawyers need to be authorised to undertake before being allowed to do so, for example, representing a client in court. The activity of will-writing is not currently a reserved legal activity. We believe that consumer protections should extend to all ‘solicitor activities’ offered by ABSs (as they already do for traditional law firms) in order to:In our constructive discussions with the Legal Services Board, we have been pressing hard for the rationalisation of the system, to ensure that the clients of legal firms, particularly vulnerable consumers, have the protection they deserve, whether they are obtaining services from a solicitor in the high street, or from the new kinds of business structures which are likely to emerge in the autumn of next year.

  • provide consistent consumer protection in what may be a rapidly changing legal services market; and
  • avoid consumer confusion over which legal services in this new market are regulated and which are not.

We have been fierce in defending the approach which the SRA set out more than two years ago, namely that the core values of the profession and protection for clients must apply across the sector. Any suggestion that the clients of ABSs should be offered a lower level of protection, or that ABSs should be given an unfair advantage on the basis of inferior consumer protection, is in our view wholly unacceptable. Therefore, we intend to apply our existing Separate Business Rule to ABSs. This will have the effect that ABSs regulated by us, like traditional law firms, would not be able to undertake unreserved legal activities through an associated unregulated entity.

There is an alternative view that the need for a level competitive playing field implies that solicitors should be able to offer non-reserved legal activities on the same basis as a firm that is not regulated at all. We consider that argument underestimates the vulnerability of many consumers. Offering consumers the choice of cheaper unregulated services or more expensive regulated ones is only meaningful if consumers have the understanding to make a reasoned choice. We have recently carried out consumer research that shows that there is a high degree of confusion among consumers over the provision of legal services, and a lack of understanding of which services are regulated and the consequences of receiving services from an unregulated provider.

The standard of at least some non-reserved activities conducted by unregulated entities (will-writing, for example) is scandalously poor. We would not tolerate the standards of non-reserved activities carried out by solicitors sinking to that standard. One may hope that consumers’ buying preferences would discriminate against poor providers and force them out of business, but consumers who buy will-writing services (or rather their heirs) may not know that the advice given was poor until it is too late. We shall therefore continue to argue for a list of reserved legal activities that more closely matches that which we believe consumers want. To put it another way, the regulatory regime needs to level the market upwards rather than downwards.

So yes, we are spearheading a revolution in the way in which the profession is regulated; yes, we are introducing a new system to license new forms of legal practice. But underpinning everything that the SRA does are the core professional values which we are determined to apply throughout our work.

Charles Plant is chair of the board of the Solicitors Regulation Authority