CILEX backs mandatory annual ethics training

30 May 2025

CILEX (the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives) has backed the idea of mandatory annual training on ethics as part of a legal profession-wide push to put ethics at the forefront of practice.

However, it cautions the Legal Services Board (LSB) about proposals that could impose onerous duties on frontline regulators that will deliver little more than what is currently in place.

It was responding to the LSB’s consultation, Upholding Professional Ethical Duties, which sets out a draft statutory statement of policy the oversight regulator proposes to publish setting out its expectations of how frontline regulators will improve knowledge of, and adherence to, ethical standards.

The response says: “CILEX broadly supports the rationale for the proposals contained in the consultation paper. The LSB has a unique facilitator role to overlay expectations of embedding and upholding professional ethics in the legal profession. The risk it will have to mitigate is, though, being too attracted to a ‘one size fits all’ approach.”

The LSB itself recognises that there are many factors that can affect how ethical duties are upheld. CILEX argues that overly detailed expectations could hamper how regulators approach the particular issues facing their own communities. The draft statement also suggests a level of broad monitoring of the activities of lawyers that is, in practice, unlikely to be possible.

“There are risks that the proposals could be onerous without adding any greater benefit than is already delivered by the specialist approaches of individual frontline regulators,” CILEX says. “There is no real evidence that the proposals will deliver that anticipated benefit nor for why the current arrangements are so deficient.

“The refocus on professional ethical duties and the LSB’s unique facilitator role to drive co-ordination and improvement in this area is welcome but care in the execution of the policy will have to be handled proportionately and flexibly if any actual benefits are to be realised.”

There are undoubtedly good ideas in the consultation – such as mandatory annual training on ethics for all lawyers, which CILEX supports – but the response points out that many organisations already provide significant support for ethical practice.

CILEX, for example, has redeveloped the CILEX Professional Qualification to ensure that ethical behaviour is embedded from the start of the training of aspiring lawyers.

The LSB has not offered sufficient evidence to justify contemplating an equivalent approach to the Senior Manager Regime operating in the financial services sector, which CILEX describes as “an extremely onerous and prescriptive system at odds with the flexibility advocated… for the legal sector”.

CILEX believes that the general definition of ethical behaviour and outcomes is a useful baseline for frontline regulators and that there should be a requirement that all comply with this. However, it does not believe that specific expectations above and beyond these are merited.

Instead, a three-step approach should be applied:

1. Are frontline regulators enforcing the general definition of ethical behaviour?
2. Do frontline regulators have appropriate procedures in place to ensure that the outcomes can be achieved?
3. Do frontline regulators have appropriate procedures in place to address circumstances where unethical behaviour has occurred or the outcomes not complied with?

CILEX President Yanthé Richardson says: “It should go without saying that lawyers always have their ethical responsibilities at the forefront of their minds, but we recognise that recent history has shown this is not always the case.

“Nobody should doubt that legal regulators and organisations like CILEX are seized of the need to address the issues raised by the LSB – indeed, we have put them at the heart of the CPQ. But in the understandable push to set high expectations, the LSB needs to avoid inadvertently hampering the work to achieve them.”

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ENDS

For further information, please contact:

Louise Eckersley, Black Letter Communications on 0203 567 1208 or email at [email protected]

Kerry Jack, Black Letter Communications on 07525 756 599 or email at [email protected]

Notes to editors:

CILEX (The Chartered Institute of Legal Executives) is one of the three main professional bodies covering the legal profession in England and Wales. The approximately 18,000 -strong membership is made up of CILEX Lawyers, Chartered Legal Executives, paralegals and other legal professionals.

CILEX pioneered the non-university route into law and recently launched the CILEX Professional Qualification (CPQ), a new approach to on-the-job training that marries legal knowledge with the practical skills, behaviours and commercial awareness needed by lawyers in the 2020s.

The CPQ is a progressive qualification framework that creates a workforce of specialist legal professionals, providing a career ladder from Paralegal through to Advanced Paralegal and ultimately full qualification as a CILEX Lawyer. CILEX Lawyers can become partners in law firms, coroners, judges or advocates in open court.

CILEX members come from more diverse backgrounds than other parts of the legal profession:

76% of its lawyers are women
16% are from ethnic minority backgrounds
- 8% are Asian or Asian British
- 5% are Black or Black British
- 3% are from a mixed ethnic background
77% attended state schools
63% come from families where neither parent attended university
Only 3% of its members have a parent who is a lawyer.

CILEX members are regulated through an independent body, CILEx Regulation. It is the only regulator covering paralegals.