A flawed Bill has been transformed into a good Act, says John Ludlow
It has been a long and winding and, at times, bumpy road but the Legal Services Bill is finally on the statute book. This is a big piece of legislation. Big not only in length—it runs to almost 500 pages, covering 200 plus sections and 24 schedules—but also in the profound impact it will have on the legal profession and on the delivery of legal services.
The Legal Services Act 2007 does a number of important things:
- It creates the Legal Services Board (LSB), to provide oversight of the approved regulators, such as the Bar and the Law Society, in place of the patchwork of supervision which currently exists.
- It establishes a wholly independent Office for Legal Complaints (OLC) to deal with all consumer complaints against lawyers.
- It gives the go-ahead for alternative business structures (ABSs), which will allow lawyers to form partnerships with non-lawyers and to accept outside investment or even ownership.
There is much more to this than the need to learn a few new acronyms. These are real changes to
