The Commonwealth's first independent regulator of legal services told the conference that the Clementi reforms in England and Wales will not cause to the sky to fall in as feared, and could improve regulation and client service.

Steve Mark, the Legal Services Commissioner for New South Wales in Australia, is the single point of entry for all complaints about solicitors, barristers and licensed conveyancers. He can either investigate himself or pass the complaint on to the relevant professional body. He added: 'I am an experiment that is under review.'


New South Wales has gone further than Clementi's recommendations and allows multi-disciplinary practices. Mr Mark said: 'We did this to allow legal professionals flexible structures to be able to compete with professional service firms, and because consumers wanted one-stop shops.'


Lawyers in such practices, he said, remain subject to the same level of regulation and the practices must have at least one solicitor-director.


'The biggest bar was ethics, as other professions didn't have such strong rules. If there is a clash between the ethics of the lawyers and non-lawyers, the provisions of the legal profession prevails.'


He added: 'We are seeing not a watering down of the ethics of the profession, but the opportunity of ensuring that the ethics of the legal profession leach into the other professions.'


Meanwhile, Mark Richardson, chief executive of the Law Society of New South Wales, explained in a separate session that becoming a voluntary representative organisation - as the professional bodies in England and Wales will have to - had turned out to be a good thing for his society.


It set a target of having 85% of practising solicitors as members; it currently has more than 92%. 'But to get there, the organisation has had to change. It has become a lot more commercial,' he said.