Looking for what?
The answer is simple – they are looking for firms like yours, provided the price and other factors are right.
Looking for what?
The answer is simple – they are looking for firms like yours, provided the price and other factors are right.
I wrote about supervision in October 2015, but it’s still an issue – as three recent SDT cases show.
These are troubled times for the Law Society. Faced with a hostile Government that doesn’t listen, a tired and mutinous membership that has lost respect, botched software projects, a vote of no confidence that was brushed aside, a critical CMA report, the SRA being an unruly assertive upstart demanding formal independence, and the LSB planning to abolish solicitors entirely, the Chief Executive resigns. And not just any resignation: Catherine Dixon condemned the Council for its unwillingness to change, describing her employer as ‘moribund, old fashioned and bureaucratic’.
My last blog considered whether a firm should change regulator. It stopped short of looking at the shifting regulatory environment and the loomin g existential fight between the SRA and the Law Society. For once, regulators are starting to find that they, rather than law firms, are the subject. It makes fascinating reading.
One of the freedoms introduced by the Legal Services Act 2007 is the ability for a law firm to switch regulator. As long as the regulator is listed in Schedule 4 of the Act and is authorised to regulate the reserved activities that the firm undertakes, then ostensibly the firm can move to them. The Act provides for new regulators, and newcomers have joined the list. So for example, the Institute of Chartered Accountants can now regulate probate activities.