Over many years in this business, I have not encountered an organisation with more lobbying clout than the Law Society of Scotland. In fact, it seems to me that the venerable Edinburgh institution has the Holyrood legislature just where it wants it.
First, and most egregiously, the Society successfully repulsed widespread calls to create a fully independent regulator for the nation’s lawyers. While at the Glasgow Herald in the 2000s, I worked with MSP John Swinney – now first minister – to expose the condescension, contempt and collusion manifested in behaviours toward clients who submitted ostensibly legitimate complaints. The Society remained adamant.
Also impressive – or notorious – is the artfulness displayed by the Society in staving off the (related) prospect of non-lawyer ownership of law firms. Godot himself will fetch up in Princes and Sauchiehall streets before alternative business structures arrive.
I do not exaggerate. It’s now 18 years since I stood up in Edinburgh’s elegant Signet Library and asked the profession’s panjandrums what they were going to do about what we then called ‘Tesco law’. Would the burghers of Berwick soon be able to pop to the supermarket for a will, while their fellow citizens in North Berwick were denied the option? It was as if a bad smell had entered the room.
On this at least, Holyrood at first appeared proactive. Fifteen years ago next month, the Scottish Parliament formally approved the introduction of ABSs. There is insufficient space here to describe the baroque machinations that followed. Suffice to say, the Society has just issued another update – announcing that it is further deferring work on ABSs till 2027.
Seventeen years and counting.
One reason given by the Society for the latest delay is that ‘limited interest’ has been expressed by firms in becoming ABSs (or licensed legal service providers, as they would be called in Scotland). That’s funny, because as long ago as 2012, the Society’s own executive director of regulation reported that increasing numbers of Scottish firms had been contacting the Society to ask about becoming a licensed provider. He went on to warn, however, that new regulations enabling them to convert remained ‘some way off’.
‘Some way off’ indeed. The good director long since carried his talent for understatement into retirement.
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