Response from CILEx to Reforming Legal Services: Regulation beyond the echo chambers
11 June 2020
Response from CILEx to Reforming Legal Services: Regulation beyond the echo chambers
The Chartered Institute of Legal Executives (CILEx) has responded to the publication today of an independent review of legal regulation, Reforming Legal Services: Regulation beyond the echo chambers, by Professor Stephen Mayson, Honorary Professor of Law at UCL.
Professor Chris Bones, the chair of CILEx, says: “Through a carefully calibrated blend of work experience and education CILEx is creating lawyers fit for practice in the 21st century. CILEx rejects the narrow sectional interest that has stood in the way of badly needed changes to the regulation of legal practitioners. The measures included in this report that will protect consumers, open the market further to full competition and ensure that legal services as an industry remains a competitive sector for the UK, are all welcomed by CILEx and by CILEx lawyers.
“Activity-based regulation is a reform that is long-overdue and CILEx is already pursuing this. If you want your teeth seen to, you don’t visit a GP. Yet in legal services this generalist approach is still the basic building block of representation: at times to the detriment of consumers.
“Professor Mayson is also right to call out the unsustainable position of having organisations that both regulate and represent their parts of the profession. The current separation of functions does not go far enough and CILEx has consistently advocated a greater degree of regulatory independence than currently permitted by law. I hope his recommendations spark action on this front sooner rather than later.
“The need to regulate technology that is delivering legal services, and the impossibility of doing so as things stand, helps neither the lawyer, nor their employer. It leaves the consumer increasingly denied access to otherwise affordable and effective legal representation.”
“We look forward to engaging with CILEx Regulation, the Legal Services Board and the government in a constructive dialogue to see how this report can be adopted as a positive and practical way forward.”
ENDS
For further information, please contact:
Kerry Jack, Black Letter Communications on 07525 756 599 or email:
Louise Eckersley, Black Letter Communications on 0203 567 1208 or email: