The LSB's business plan set out three themes, including ‘competence’, under which it proposed routine checks on lawyers and ongoing formal reviews of competence.
Announcing the plan, Helen Phillips, Chair of the Legal Services Sector, LSB, said: ‘We need to reshape legal services to better meet the needs of society.
The LSB first proposed a single regulator for all legal services in 2016. Last year, Professor Stephen Mayson’s review of regulation, ‘Reforming legal services’, concluded that it was time to move to a single regulator.
However, the Bar Council accused the LSB this week of having ‘fallen into the trap’ of behaving as though it regulates legal services, rather than overseeing the regulation of leal services. It said the LSB’s strategy aim of a single regulator for all legal services was not a ‘proper and lawful exercise’ of its powers, and ran counter to the Legal Services Act 2007, which purposefully did not merge the various professions.
Moreover, the Bar Council said, the LSB’s intention of ‘reshaping legal services to better meet society’s needs’ was inappropriate for a body mandated to providing oversight of regulation.
