A great deal of work has gone into preparing responses to Sir David Clementi's consultation paper on the review of the regulation of legal services.

Peter Williamson reflects on the importance of the issues at stake

The past few months have involved an immense amount of work across the Law Society, preparing our response to Sir David Clementi's consultation paper on the review of the regulation of legal services.

This has included not only consulting with the profession all over the country, but also seeking members' views through a questionnaire, and spending a great deal of time analysing the proposals made, meeting with stakeholders and debating the issues within council and in the many other parts of the Society.

It has been a long and exhausting task, but I am proud of the result, which I hope is a balanced reflection of the views of most in the profession.

The Law Society's response is a well-considered, rounded document, the contents of which have been the subject of great scrutiny and debate.

If you have not had the opportunity to read the response I would urge you to do so and it can be found on the Society's Web site (www.lawsociety.org.uk).

Of course the Law Society is only one of many organisations that have responded to Sir David Clementi's consultation.

Having completed our response, it has been extremely interesting to read the views of other organisations and to see how far they concur with, or diverge from, the views taken by the Law Society.

In Clifford Chance's response, the law firm supports a B+ model for regulation - the establishment of a legal services board to oversee the existing professional bodies, which would be required to separate their regulatory activities from their representative roles.

Both the Bar Council and the Law Society of Scotland also give cautious support to a variation of the model B approach.

These approaches are not dissimilar to our own.

By contrast, the Legal Services Commission (LSC) in its response firmly supports the establishment of a single legal services authority to replace the existing professional bodies.

The LSC suggests that this is necessary to ensure the independence of regulation, suggesting that the current professional bodies cannot provide such independence in dealing with complaints because 'the balance of effort' in such a body must go into looking after the interests of its members.

Unfortunately, this view overlooks a number of important factors.

First, for the Law Society, the robust handling of complaints is a central part of looking after the interests of our members.

It is essential that public confidence in lawyers and the legal system is promoted and protected.

Effectively addressing consumer concerns about service and disciplining those practitioners who are guilty of misconduct is an important way of doing this.

Secondly, the LSC makes specific criticisms of the Law Society's regulatory work, a view that it uses to justify its support for model A.

I do not pretend that the Society's record has been uniformly brilliant.

But the past couple of years have seen a transformation in the Society's approach to complaints, both in terms of policy and management on the ground.

These changes are beginning to bear fruit and the past ten months have seen a sustained improvement in our record on complaints.

The Law Society has demonstrated that it is committed to an independent, robust and effective approach to complaints, rendering these criticisms redundant.

While Clifford Chance opts for the B+ model in terms of the overall regulatory framework, it takes a different approach in relation to complaints, arguing that an independent complaints organisation would be more appropriate in seeking to protect the public.

It is suggested that complaints should 'be handled in a way which is independent of the profession, efficient, effective, fair and at a reasonable cost'.

I do not disagree with a word of that, but I am not wholly convinced that the establishment of a separate independent complaints body is necessarily the best, or only, way of achieving this.

The Law Society is open-minded about whether such a body should be established, but we would emphasise that there are other factors to be taken into consideration.

The current system operated by the Law Society is entirely independent from the organisation's representative arm and, through its considerable efforts over the past few years, has gone a long way to ensuring that its handling of complaints is consistently efficient, effective and fair.

If you want a system that is independent, there is no reason why it cannot be operated by a professional body, provided it is established in the right way.

But most important perhaps is the point made very ably by the Council of the Bars and Law Societies of the European Union in its response - that self-regulation is important because it is essentially a corollary to the core value of lawyers' independence.

And the fundamental importance of this independence is a point made by every organisation that represents the legal profession.

It is clear that lawyers, their professional bodies and many other interested parties have reflected deeply on the questions Sir David has posed, and they have taken the trouble to provide well-researched, thoughtful and incisive responses.

This reflects the importance of the issues at stake and is certain to give Sir David plenty of food for thought as he works on his report over the coming months.

Peter Williamson is the Law Society President