Mother in Law: Mazur – on whose authority?

If you are sick of hearing about Mazur, as ever, you don’t have to read this column. I actually thought by the time this piece was due it might have all blown over, but of course it hasn’t. It is affecting us every day at work, and on a very human level. 

If you haven’t heard about it at all, it is the recent case that clarified that non-solicitors are not authorised to conduct ‘reserved activities’, including (among other things) litigation and probate activities, even within the supervision offered by a solicitors’ firm. That includes the ‘senior paralegals’, ‘family law executives’ and other non-qualified fee-earners we will all have come across, who have merrily run caseloads, submitted probate applications and represented clients at directions hearings for decades. That includes teams of paralegals in conveyancing factories and personal injury claims firms. Most frustratingly, though, it includes chartered legal executives.

You know, the chartered legal executives who, since the Legal Services Act 2007, have been able to be partners in law firms. The same ones who are encouraged to apply to become judges. The same ones whose institute has been working towards ‘parity’ (and I quote) with solicitors for the two decades I’ve been practising. 

They have all been committing criminal offences.

It is a very confusing situation. I think I have learned the following:

• CILEX and CILEx Regulation are two separate bodies, one professional and one regulatory.  
• A chartered legal executive is different from a CILEX Lawyer (crucially with a capital L). The latter has an additional qualification, I think, that was brought in from 2022 and means you are authorised to conduct reserved activities. 
• Chartered legal executives are not permitted to run cases under the supervision of solicitors. They are only permitted to assist. 
• They can administer oaths, though, so that’s nice.

What I still don’t understand is who decided that the additional qualification makes you an authorised person. But that is where we are at the moment.

Of course, in my experience at least, if you draw a Venn diagram of all chartered legal execs, there will be one circle of women with caring responsibilities, and one circle of people who couldn’t afford to go to university, and those circles will almost entirely be overlapping. This situation disproportionately affects the people we want in the profession – people who have strived to get where they are despite their background. Unlike, say, some of the anonymous online commenters I’ve seen who are not only a waste of university fees but a waste of oxygen too. We want more of them and less of you.  

It should be so unnecessary to say this, but for the avoidance of any doubt, I see absolutely no difference in the quality of the legal services offered by colleagues and opponents who are solicitors or chartered legal execs. 

I’ve seen people absolutely broken over the last few weeks. Not all of them have got the energy and confidence to sit an exam now. And if they take the ‘portfolio route’, it seems the only way to get the additional rights is to set out in great detail your experience of conducting reserved activities, also now known as criminal activity. In the meantime, we are seeing very senior lawyers having to get work checked by their NQ staff. We are seeing insurers asking for details of all reserved activities carried out by chartered legal execs over the last six years, which (just to recap) includes probate applications and exchanges of contract. We are waiting and praying that costs lawyers have a bit of decency and don’t throw colleagues in the profession under the bus. Not every individual is going to come out of this unscathed.

I think CILEX (or maybe CILEx Regulation, who knows which) has got a huge amount to answer for here. We’ve all seen the contradictory archived website pages, webinars and letters to members. I think, actually, with the rise of solicitor apprenticeships, they are going to have to do something before they become redundant themselves. 

I really hope we can all be grown-ups about this and not try to score points against our CILEX colleagues while this is being resolved. 

Some facts and identities have been altered in the above article