Today is the day when, finally, more than four years after the Legal Services Act received Royal Assent, the SRA started accepting applications for Alternative Business Structures (ABS), thus meaning we’re on the cusp of a possible “titanic battle for the hearts and minds of potential customers” as the new style legal businesses jump into the existing legal marketplace. Or, more likely, a prolonged period of trench warfare as “traditional” law firms struggle to adapt to the challenges posed by new forms of I.T, fixed fees and ever increasing insurance premiums.
The Ministry of Justice sent out a press release hailing this “milestone” and saying, rather misleadingly in my view,
From today UK consumers and businesses will find solicitors’ firms more competitive, more accessible and more efficient following reforms to legal services.
Leaving aside the issue of whether the introduction of ABS will bring all this about (and it would probably be silly to deny that it won’t have any effect at all) isn’t it going too far to claim that merely by accepting applications for ABS the whole legal landscape will change as they predict? At least give the SRA chance to actually process a few applications first! It may be at least a month before the lucky applicants are known – which also sounds rather optimistic.
From what I read before Christmas there were only a handful of interested parties anyway. I wonder if that remained the case or whether the Postman delivering the SRA’s mail had an especially large mailbag today?
Time will tell.
Last month the Law Society published the outcome of a survey it had conducted amongst small firms, which claimed that 1 in 10 small practices were planning to close down because of the cost of complying with the regulatory regime contained in the new Solicitors’ Handbook, commonly known as “Outcomes Focused Regulation” (OFR) would [...]
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Sponsored Post OUTCOMES-FOCUSED REGULATION SEMINAR TO BE HELD BY CORELEGAL London’s leading one-stop shop for legal support services, CoreLegal, has come together with two of the leading speakers in their field to stage a half-day CPD seminar, which takes as its subject the highly topical question of ‘Outcomes-Focused Regulation’ (OFR). CoreLegal is [...]
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Brands won’t kill your law firm, clients will. Solicitors need to engage with their clients and find out what they want. The top line was the title of a webinar I took part in last night with Jon Busby of Epoq (@legal2.0) and Amanda Bancroft of 41Minds, a digital media agency who may be better [...]
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In addition to wanting to reform employment law, the government also wants to improve the public’s understanding of the legal process by allowing filming inside courts. It is bound to be controversial – do you remember the furore over televising parliament when that was first proposed? In general I tend to be in favour [...]
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So, today is the day: 6th October 2011, ABS day. The day when the last element of the Legal Services Act comes into force, except that it hasn’t unless you happen to be licensed by the Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC), who had the pleasure of making history by licensing the very first ABS. Premier [...]
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Now that the clock is ticking ever nearer to ABS Hour (for Licensed Conveyancers if not Solicitors for the time being) more and more businesses are launching their products, or announcing plans to launch. The current plan de nos jours seems to be online. Back in May, In-Deed, the online conveyancing portal fronted by Harry [...]
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One of the main reasons behind the creation of the Legal Services Act was the then government’s perception that the framework for the provision of legal services in the UK was “out-dated, inflexible, over-complex and insufficiently accountable or transparent”(*). The then existing regulatory structure was then replaced with a new edifice that supposedly addressed these [...]
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This is the first Troubleahead podcast. A little while ago I met up with Gary Yantin, solicitor and Managing Director of High Street Lawyer.com, to discuss how HighStreetLawyer.com works and to chew over the challenges posed to practitioners by the Legal Services Act. Gary is well worth listening to for not only his explanation of [...]
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The Legal Services Act has inspired much debate, created many column inches of writing, destroyed many trees and caused much angst. It has also created (or given rise to) so many acronyms that you could have a game of Scrabble or Countdown with them all. So with Carol Vorderman back in the news following her [...]
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