The legal consumer watchdog has called for disciplinary action against all lawyers to go through a single channel. 

In a damning report into the regulatory framework, the Legal Services Consumer Panel says the current way of prosecuting misconduct, with separate pathways for solicitors and barristers, ‘defies coherent governance’. 

‘Multiple tribunals and disciplinary bodies with overlapping or inconsistent approaches undermine fairness, transparency, and public confidence,’ the position paper states. ‘A unified disciplinary pathway would strengthen accountability and reduce duplication.’ 

Regulation

Multiple tribunals and disciplinary bodies 'undermine fairness'

Source: Thinkstock

The panel described the current arrangement – where Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal members are appointed by the master of the rolls, the organisation is funded by the Law Society and the functioning overseen by the Legal Services Board – as ‘indefensible’.

The call for a single disciplinary process was part of a wider demand for a single regulator to replace eight frontline organisations overseeing different parts of the profession.

The status quo leaves consumers unable to rely on consistent protection and is ‘structurally incapable’ of delivering the objectives set out in the Legal Services Act, the report states. 

‘Most people assume that when they instruct a lawyer or seek legal advice, there is a coherent system of rules, protections, and redress standing behind that transaction. There is not,’ said the panel. ‘Instead, there are eight separate regulatory frameworks, each with different rules about what happens when things go wrong.

‘Whether you can complain, who will hear it, whether you are entitled to compensation, and how much you might receive depends not on what happened to you but on which professional title the person who failed you happened to hold.’

The report concludes that incremental changes are not an option and that a single, independent, risk-based regulator is the only credible response to the current crisis in the sector.

The call comes in the same week as independent reviewer Richard Lloyd recommended that the government start a complete overhaul of legal regulation.