Whatever you might think of the Legal Services Board’s apparent oversight of frontline regulators, it has an exquisite sense of timing.

After working on a review for more than a year into the SRA’s (mis)handling of SSB Law, the organisation chose last week to publish its report and stick the boot in.

Bruised SRA leaders might have wanted to lay low for a little while, but there is no chance of that given that the annual compliance conference is happening in Birmingham tomorrow. More than 1,000 compliance officers will arrive presumably wanting more from the SRA chair Anna Bradley than they got last year: at the 2024 conference, Bradley said the issues with Axiom Ince (subject of another recent LSB report) were ‘history’. The chair’s customary request for a round of applause by the end was not well received.

This year’s conference programme begins with a 40-minute conversation with Bradley and the outgoing chief executive Paul Philip, in a session we can predict with some certainty will be described afterwards as ‘tense’.

The rest of the agenda does sound a little like the organiser was trolling his or her own employer. Breakout sessions include ones on ‘claims management: what you need to know’, ‘continuing competence: getting it right’ and ‘resolving complaints at the earliest opportunity’. One imagines the board members of the SRA might benefit from attending all three.