Monday
Word first began to leak about the closure of PM Law Ltd and associated firms.
At that stage, little was known about what had happened, although it appeared as if another disaster was under way: many clients left in the lurch mid-transaction, around 600 staff suddenly out of a job, the profession’s reputation facing a blow.
As the week progressed, we found out more. The Solicitors Regulation Authority intervened on Wednesday, and stories of heartbreak for clients began leaking out – money frozen or lost, extra costs incurred, health affected.
We still don’t know enough to form judgements, but the pattern seems clear. What I wrote at the end of last year is unfortunately proving depressingly true:
‘the picture emerges of a regulator, along with its super-regulator cheerleader, which have allowed a legal services market to develop which they can no longer control. They are running after developments, trying to clear them up … without a radical restructuring, the genie will never be put back in the bottle, and we might be facing a future of repeated Axiom Inces and SSB Groups. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice comes to mind, where the apprentice floods the premises because he has unleashed magic he does not understand.’
We must think ourselves out of this repetitive fate.
Tuesday
News broke that Anthropic has launched an agentic AI specifically aimed at the legal market.
Anthropic is the company behind Claude. It was set up by former OpenAI members, and is supported through investment by Amazon and Google, among others. The shares in major players in the legal market, like Pearson and Wolters Kluwer, immediately fell.
This was not a product launched through a longing to improve access to justice and the rule of law. Like other big AI players, Anthropic has taken on billions in funding and needs more cash. Legal services are an obvious target. The new tools will automate work like contract reviewing, non-disclosure agreement triage, compliance workflows, legal briefings and templated responses.
I know this development will enthuse many, and we can’t resist what is all but overwhelming. But I think of the junior lawyers no longer needed or properly trained, the skills erosion, our increasing dependence on American-owned tech whose services may be weaponised against us – never mind the staggering cost in energy and water usage for the data centres.
Wednesday
Schadenfreude day: ever since Paul, Weiss became the first US law firm to broker a deal with President Trump to avoid one of the President’s infamous executive orders against law firms, I have followed the fate of the firm’s chairman who brokered the deal, Brad Karp. On Wednesday, he resigned as chairman because of his appearance in the Epstein files.
As W. H. Auden wrote, ‘A shilling life will give you all the facts’ – you can read them here. But essentially Brad Karp attended dinners, and most particularly wrote a (to put it mildly) ill-advised email to Epstein about Epstein’s legal case just before he was found dead in prison. The law firm’s deciding group decided on Wednesday to replace him as chairman.
Thursday
There was good news (of sorts). The Ministry of Justice announced that the deadline for its consultation on Interest on Lawyers’ Clients Accounts Schemes (ILCA) would be extended by four weeks to 9 March 2026.
I have rarely seen an issue so unite the profession into a single view, in this case of total opposition to the government’s proposals. Even the abolition of jury trials has some supporters among criminal lawyers. But ILCA? A big thumbs-down.
Friday
I escaped the drumbeat of public events, and attended a meeting of the UK Delegation to the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE). The CCBE is an organisation of which solicitors should be more aware.
The Law Society, along with the other UK legal professional bodies, is a member of the UK Delegation. Much of the CCBE’s work is no longer directly relevant to the Law Society because it deals with EU legislation. And yet there are significant areas which are borderless, some touched on in this article, like AI, climate change, migration and the rule of law; and some are still within our scope, like developments at the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights, since the UK remains a member.
Part of the meeting was devoted to the various experts who represent the UK on CCBE committees, which develop policy on a wide range of topics – access to justice, ethics, family, criminal, company, AML, and IT law, among others. It was heartening to hear their accounts of how their expertise is valued in a European setting, and how UK experts continue to be among the chief contributors to collective European outcomes, despite the emotions raised by Brexit.
As a result, the week ended positively.
Jonathan Goldsmith is Law Society Council member for EU & International, chair of the Law Society’s Policy & Regulatory Affairs Committee and a member of its board. All views expressed are personal and are not made in his capacity as a Law Society Council member, nor on behalf of the Law Society
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