The legal ombudsman charging £1,500 for a decision; the SRA separating COLP and COFA from management; and the expropriation of interest on client accounts, the margin that arguably keeps many firms alive.
‘Small legal practices face an existential crisis,’ declares one Gazette reader. He was musing on the Law Society’s warning that some firms will settle meritless client complaints just to avoid the burden of dealing with them under a beefed-up first-tier complaints regime.
Chancery Lane pointed out too that solicitors need guidance on AI-generated complaints, which are often notable for their daunting heft. Giving people a handy tool to articulate their real or imagined grievances exhaustively and at length cuts both ways. Will lawyers be expected to respond to every bullet point confected by a neural network whirring away in a field somewhere? Maybe.
At what point does this ever-growing list of additions and subtractions become insupportable? Judging by the alacrity with which consolidators are hoovering up high street mainstays, perhaps that point has already been reached for many.
Elsewhere this week, MPs expended 10,500 words debating anti-SLAPPs legislation that just about everyone agrees is sorely needed. Yet still we wait, partly because no one can really yet define what a SLAPP actually comprises.
Amid the congratulations for honourable members on their mutual sagacity, Sarah Sackman’s contribution was arresting. ‘We need to look again at the SRA’s enforcement powers and whether it has the tools it needs to charge fines and place disciplinary sanctions on those lawyers who let down the reputation of the profession,’ the courts minister said. ‘That culture change is important, and it needs to be a cross-government initiative.’
Sir Wyn Williams’ forthcoming report on the Post Office scandal – focusing on the contribution of lawyers to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history – will spur further calls for that ‘culture change’.
On SLAPPS, though, Sackman was careful not to offer any commitment that a less helpful MP might quote back to her in a few months. Alluding to the anti-SLAPPs private member’s bills presently in train, she spoke only of her confidence ‘that we can get a carefully balanced and proportionate approach that the government can support’.
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