Happy New Year!
The year-end issue of The Economist contains an interesting short article (available here) on the report from a governmental commission about reform of the legal profession in England. Sir David Clementi, chairman of Prudential, chaired the Legal Services Review. (The full report is available here.) The Economist characterizes Sir David's view of the profession as follows:
[He] persists in the view -- a perverse one, as far as some in the legal profession are concerned -- that lawyers exist mostly to sell services to consumers, and that they don't do so very well.
The Review suggests that the English legal profession has many anticompetitive aspects and practices that should be reformed. For example, complaints against solicitors and barristers should not be heard and resolved by committees of those professions but, rather, by independent panels. Moreover, solicitors and barristers should be allowed to set up offices together and to take investment funds to do so from outside the legal profession. Finally, to prevent future anticompetitive practices an independent governmental regulator, the Legal Services Board, should have oversight of the profession.
These reforms are intriguing but not so obviously sound that they command assent. It will come as no surprise that the Bar Council, the professional association of barristers, and the Law Society, that of solicitors, have both had extensive criticisms. (The Bar Council's website is here; the Law Society's criticisms of the Clementi report are here.)
TSU
