Reflections after a council meeting

I can vouch for the surprisingly positive response to the speech given by the new chief executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority to the Law Society Council last week, as reported by the Gazette. 

The quotes in the Gazette article, that Sarah Rapson appeared ‘very open, and willing to listen and collaborate’ and that the contrast with her predecessor was stark and surely calculated, could have come from a number of council members.

But so could the response that ‘fine words butter no parsnips’. We all have an interest in the fine words leading to fine deeds. Yet, as others have pointed out, the ‘nostra culpa’ tour by Sarah Rapson on behalf of the SRA, while a welcome start, throws a challenging question over the continuation in post of members of the SRA Board and in particular of the Board chair.

As for the rest of the council meeting, it had points in common with all council meetings, and with other meetings of lawyers’ professional associations, where representatives come together to support their members.

Point one: There is always a struggle on the agenda between external policy issues and internal administration. We discussed legal policy which would obviously be raised during a 2026 council that is doing its job properly. It doesn’t breach confidentiality to say that these issues included Mazur, jury trials, the question of conveyancers being registered as tax advisers if they advise on stamp duty, plus obviously the relationship between the Law Society and the SRA.

Point two: Within any large and functioning organisation consisting of various governance bodies – council, board, committees, a strong and committed executive staff – there will inevitably be a healthy tension between who does what, and where decisions can best be taken. Canine metaphors describe the situation: why keep a dog and bark yourself? Is the tail wagging the dog? (Yes, on and on: cut off the speakers who are barking up the wrong tree.) The point is to keep discussions on internal governance issues to a necessary minimum, to avoid policy being drowned out.

Point three: Like any army, professional associations tend to fight the last war. It is difficult to concentrate on the future. To be fair to the Law Society, it is currently undertaking an exercise to see what life will be like for the profession and the Law Society in 2040 – good luck with that in the current circumstances!

But as regards policy solutions, apart from in a handful of topics like AI and climate change where circumstances force us to think ahead, we are still looking backwards. For instance:

• Legal aid: We continue to hold out for large-scale investment in the justice system, although our economy is struggling, and we all know that, if public money is to be found, it will first be allocated to defence, whose needs shriek at us every day. So, while continuing to hope and lobby for public money, we should urgently think of new ways of funding future legal services.

• Courts: We continue to see the courts as our principal arena for dispute resolution, but a huge and growing amount of disputes, in terms of both value and number of cases, are settled by arbitration, domestic and international. Yet arbitration is a largely unconsidered area, in terms of who does it (not always lawyers), under what ethical codes (sometimes conflicting), and with what overarching oversight (none). So we should include arbitration within our policy discussions as soon as possible.

• Regulation: We continue to think of regulation as covering only humans, when a growing percentage of legal services are, and will continue be, provided by autonomous machines. No-one is close to regulating that. The SRA probably thinks it is a matter for the government, while the government is caught, on the one hand, between the harms it knows are caused and, on the other, by its desperation to attract economic benefits and not upset the current US government. Serious thought should be given now to ensuring that the regulation of lawyers does not become a shrinking activity, with most legal services unregulated.

The Law Society Council is an admirable example of a body which successfully represents a broad cross-section of the profession, in practice area, form of practice and identity of lawyers. When jury trials are discussed, representatives of both defence and prosecution give their views. When interest on lawyers’ client accounts is the topic, we hear from all sizes and types of practice.

It is an inevitable part of a members’ body, or the ones that I know, that the members think those governing it don’t have a clue, always make the wrong decision, and are cut off from members’ concerns.

But the address by Sarah Rapson, and the many pertinent questions put to her by council members, were one example of our being at the heart of members’ current concerns.

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