News from the Board

Reflections on our December Board - Anna Bradley

08 December 2022

This was our final meeting of the calendar year and we began by receiving an independent review of our Board effectiveness. An important piece of reflection which will see us making some tweaks to the way we do things.

In formal session, we made the rules for Keeping of the Roll and I am delighted to say that after careful analysis, the administration charge will be only £20; less than we had anticipated and the same as it was in 2014. We also made the wellbeing rules.

The Board was pleased to hear that practising certificate renewals had gone well and also that we have been awarded a grant under the third round of the BEIS Regulators Pioneer Fund for a new project on making alternative dispute resolution work better for individuals and businesses. We also reviewed the action plan for narrowing our own ethnicity gap, ahead of publication of the next gender and ethnicity pay gap reports.

But the Board was disappointed to hear that, exactly four years after we introduced our transparency rules, a significant number of firms are still not publishing the information that they are required to provide to help the public make good choices about purchasing legal services. Whatever the reasons might be it is simply not acceptable for firms to disregard the rules in this way.

Our research has shown that consumers find this information helpful, and we have also heard from firms that have found it has brought them new clients. In short, the transparency rules are delivering market benefits that we should all be happy with.

The Board were therefore pleased to hear that we will be turning up the heat. We are currently reviewing 2,500 law firms’ websites and we will be taking a robust enforcement approach where firms are falling short. So if you haven’t turned your mind to these rules yet, I would strongly recommend that you do so now.

Our next full Board meeting will be in February 2023 in London. In the meantime I wish everyone a happy new year.