Legal services

Anyone interested in the future of legal services or in the management of a law firm should grab a copy of Lord Hunt’s Review of the Regulation of Legal Services.

Little attention has been paid to a quiet revolution so profound that many solicitors’ firms may end up as quasi-alternative business structures. For over a decade, firms have been employing paralegals in ever greater numbers. They have also been delegating ever more complex, client-facing, work to paralegals. That fact is old news; what’s new is that we are approaching the point when paralegal fee-earners in firms may begin to outnumber solicitors—where solicitors become a minority in their own profession.

“Bombed—lost everything”. That was how one London Citizens Advice bureau memorably recorded the nature of the legal problems for the newly dispossessed “streams” of clients approaching the nascent service. War was declared on 3 September 1939 and the first bureau opened its doors the next day.

As legal aid limps past 60, Elsa Booth suggests the adoption of some alternative funding pathways

New measures for regulating lawyers, including a lay majority on each regulatory board, have been branded a “curate’s egg” by the Law Society.

The Law Society has published its shortlist for this year’s Excellence Awards.

If it’s a 60 in London, it’s only 35 in Washington. National legal aid got going later in the US. President Obama issued a special proclamation celebrating the 35th birthday of a US national civil legal aid service through the establishment of a legal service corporation.

The new head of the Criminal Bar Association (CDA) has called on the government to re-think its “ill-considered and cavalier cuts” to publicly funded work.

David Oldham observes how IT is increasingly used in court

Some 3,600 sole practitioner solicitors are to be dropped from the Britannia and Co-Operative conveyancing panel, prompting the Law Society to mount a rescue attempt.