Presidents and secretaries conference 2012
John Wotton, president, Law Society of England and Wales
Friends and colleagues, may I also, on behalf of the Law Society, extend to you all my welcome to this conference. I am delighted that it has again received such wide support from Local Law Societies across England & Wales. It is a real pleasure for me to be able to address you today. I have come to know many of you (and your predecessors) in my travels around the country over the past three years. Thank you all for your generous hospitality and for the time you have spent helping me to understand the concerns of your members. Sadly, despite my best efforts to cover the territory, there are a number of law societies represented here whom I have not visited and I hope that Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, Nick Fluck and Andrew Caplen will make good my omissions over the next three years.
We share the honour and the responsibility of representing a very successful legal profession, which has kept on growing through the financial crisis and recession (if we are actually in one at the moment). More importantly, our profession has kept on serving the rule of law and access to justice for all, training several thousand new lawyers every year in the standards and values we adhere to, employing several hundred thousand people and contributing hugely to the economy.I remember speaking to many of you a year ago, when the profession was standing on the cusp of change: twelve months on we gather together as representatives and leaders of a profession which has crossed the Rubicon of liberalisation – there can be no turning back for us or for our members.
The full consequences of allowing outside ownership and investment in solicitors practices and multi-disciplinary practices, combined with a whole range of other competitive pressures on solicitors have yet to play out. Indeed, we still have little idea of how rapidly and fundamentally the structure of our profession will change over the coming years. At this time of rapid change and uncertainty, the imperative for all of us must be, more than ever, to work together at national and local level to help our members succeed in the challenging legal services market and grab the opportunities that it will offer.
Your societies and the Law Society have complementary roles in supporting the future health of our profession and our objectives must remain the same: that we have a dynamic, financially secure and independent legal profession which operates effectively in the new legal services market to serve the interests of the rule of law, justice and our clients. With this in mind and for the sake of the individual members who depend on us, we must all reach out across the profession to engage the enthusiasm and energies of as many solicitors as possible, so as to develop and deliver those services which are of greatest value to our members.
I know that local law societies achieve a huge amount in sustaining a strong local legal community, providing valued training and social events and maintaining close links with courts, judges and officials in your areas. You achieve an enormous amount, in many cases on the strength of rather few committed people. This is wonderful, but not sustainable in the long term. I know that many of you have ideas about how to adapt to the changing needs of lawyers. Indeed, I was delighted that the immediate Past Presidents of Birmingham and Manchester Law Societies accepted my recent invitation to address the Council about the ways in which their Societies are adapting their governance and operations, to cope better with the changes going on around us. They gave us much food for thought.
- In this more ‘mixed' legal environment, questions will inevitably arise for law societies around who they choose to represent and how their relationships with non-legal professionals should develop.
I know that some local law societies have taken the first step towards wider representation and admitted professionals from their wider legal community and as a result have more resources and more influence, to the benefit of all of their members.
Thisis not a step the national society has taken. We remain the professional body for solicitors of England & Wales. Increasingly, however, the practices owned by solicitors employ barristers, legal executives and foreign-qualified lawyers and non-lawyer managers. There are more and more mixed partnerships of solicitors and other lawyers. In-house legal departments are similarly mixed. And, over time, more and more solicitors and other lawyers will work in ABS, with more or less non-lawyer ownership and management. We are already providing services to many practices which are not wholly owned by solicitors and this can only increase. The leaders of all these types of practice may wish to have the services of the Law Society available to all their lawyers and, to sustain their support, we too may have to adapt. By doing so we will be able to provide the most effective matrix of services for our members and at the best value. And local law societies will also need to consider to what extent - or even whether - they want to do the same thing.
There is one particularly opportunity that I think the Law Society and local law societies are not grasping fully and that is engaging the more junior part of our profession. The first group of guests I entertained to dinner after I became President was the committee of the Junior Lawyers Division and on my travels, through your good offices, I have metmany lawyers who are new to the profession. I am always impressed by their enthusiasm, collegiality, dedication and capacity for new ideas. Junior lawyers are fantastic at networking –as anyone who has ever attended a JLD party will attest to – and they are involved in and engaged with new media which can offer local law societies new ways of communicating with and increasing their potential membership.
But once these people, who havebeen active in the Junior Lawyers Division, or local groups, have been qualified for five years, it has been hard to find a role for them in the national law society.The same may be true at local level.
If we cannot engage with these members now and harness their enthusiasm and energy then we will find it harder to do so as their careers progress, to our detriment. Currently I believe it is all too easy for junior lawyers to just drift away from the national and local law society fold, and believe it would be in all our interests to make special efforts to prevent that.It may well be that our definition of a junior lawyer is too narrow. For the international junior lawyers body, AIJA, it is 45 years old!
The Law Society needs to encourage young lawyers to put themselves forward for Council and Committee positions, but it may be also be helpful for local law societies to reach out to newly qualified lawyers and the Junior Lawyers Division to encourage individuals to take a role in their local law society, to understand how it works and how they can contribute, so as to sustain their commitment as their careers progress. Those local law societies with thriving JLD membership are among those who are best equipped for the future.
In our new legal services market, as mixed practices and ‘mixed' representation develop, questions are already being raised about regulation. Already, one sees the Legal Services Board, senior judges and the SRA questioning whether current regulatory structures are suitable for the profession. It is vital that in any discussion about the development of any regulation of ‘legal professionals', that the body which represents 90% of those individuals plays a leading role.
The issue will become live, if activities such as will-writing and estate administration are to become reserved activities (although my own view is that when this happens, unregulated providers should either meet the criteria for regulation by the SRA as ABS, under the current rules, or shut down.
Meanwhile the Law Society will continue to work with all of our members, promoting the services and activities that the Law Society has to offer; keeping the profession informed of national trends and linking individuals into specific areas of the Law Society's work, including risk and compliance issues – which look set to increase in significance as COLPs and COFAs become responsible for their firms' compliance.
Risk and Compliance Service members who are COLPs or COFAs will in future be able to submit their queries to be considered by Law Society regulatory compliance experts, together with a panel made up of practitioners.
- If an individual or firm then follows advice from the CRG or our Risk & Compliance Service and subsequently finds that action is being considered or taken against them by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Law Society will stand by that individual or firm.This latest service is in addition to a range of guidance and support to our members on OFR and wider compliance support including practice notes, online training and diagnostics.
The national law society can also ‘step-in' and work with a local law society to provide solutions to our members' problems when they are needed. Many of our members have experienced unacceptable delays with the online PC renewal process. Across England and Wales our regional managers were able to act as points of contact and support when queries were referred from local law society members. There wasfrequent dialogue between local law society Presidents and Secretaries and our UK operations team to cut through delays and resolve members problems' with their online renewals, speedily and effectively.
Local law societies and their members have also been instrumental in helping to secure changes to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of OffendersAct, in objecting to the changes that HSBC made to their lenders panels and in providing tangible examples of unscrupulous will-writers who have acted incompetently, feeding in to the recommendation from the LSB that will-writing becomes a reserved activity.
It is because of the campaigning efforts and support of many of our local law societies that the LASPO Act, when it received Royal Assent, was in much better shape than the Bill which was first introduced to the House of Commons (although we cannot pretend the final contents of the Bill were the outcome we had hoped for). It was great to see the profession working together across the country in this campaign and engaging the support of many voluntary bodies and pressure groups for the cause. The links we have forged and the respect we have gained for the principled stance we took, in the public interest, will stand us in good stead as we gird ourselves up to ensure that, in the new world of reduced public funding, individual will be able to assert and defend their rights effectively, irrespective of their means. Lucy Scott-Moncrieff will, I am sure, speak more of this later on.
The profession faces many challenges: a stagnant economy,reduced conveyancing transactions, increased competition and changes to theprovision of legal aid and the civil costs regime. Finding solutions for those problems will not be easy but there are opportunities for those who seek them.
I have seen for myself how many firms, of all types and in all regions, are identifying growth areas for work and exploring new business models to deliver legal services with lower overheads. I have seen examples of how firms are using cloud computing to manage infrastructure and costs and focus on delivering high quality legal services and excellent client care. Others are using video conferencing and Skype, sophisticated case management systems and electronic communications.
Many firms (including my own) are organising themselves so that work is carried out in the most economic location available and some are making more extensive use of outsourcing (whether onshore or offshore. There is, as I do not need to tell you, an increasing pool of ambitious individuals who want to join our profession, but do not at present to have the opportunity to start a training contract. That presents its own difficulties, but it behoves us to harness their talents and start to develop their careers, for if we do not, our competitors surely will! But we are, in truth a highly innovative, adaptable and client-focused profession (perhaps uniquely so, in the legal world) and those are some of our great strengths, both in our home market and internationally.
Finally, I would like, if I may, to end on a personal note. Over the past three years as an Office Holder of the Law Society I have been fortunate enough to spend time visiting some of the most beautiful towns and cities in England & Wales (and, to be fair, some more noted for qualities other than their physical charms) and learned more about our profession and the clients it serves than in the whole of my previous career. There I have met and enjoyed the hospitality of the most committed and inspiring group of people I have had the privilege to know – your members and, chiefly, yourselves. I would like to say a very heartfelt thank you and assure you all that, under the leadership of Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, Nick Fluck, Andrew Caplen and, of course, Des Hudson, the co-operation between the Law Society and local law societies will go on from strength to strength.
Thank you.