Professor Stephen Mayson has just published his report ‘Reforming Legal Services—Regulation beyond the Echo Chambers’. It is a prodigious piece of work. Professor Mayson has worked long and hard and consulted far and wide, to produce what is probably the most comprehensive and reliable review of legal regulation in England and Wales ever undertaken.
There should be a hunger for reform, but perhaps those responsible to deliver change have no appetite at all to do so. This is not just about other preoccupations, although we are in a time of other preoccupations, it is about believing that making the effort to change and pursuing a long overdue coherent vision for legal services is worth the trouble. Dealing with lawyers is almost always trouble—perhaps because that’s their business.
In his report, Professor Mayson is much too generous about the Byzantine structures which have accumulated before and after the Legal Services Act 2007. Personally, I have never seen the
