The Legal Services Board is an independent body responsible for overseeing the regulation of lawyers in England and Wales. It is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, created through the Legal Services Act of 2007 (LSA2007).
The Legal Services Board is politically and financially independent of the government. Costs are covered entirely by a levy on the approved regulators of the legal professions. Its overriding mandate is to ensure that regulation in the legal services sector is carried out in the public interest and that the interests of consumers are placed at the heart of the system.
The Board came into being on 1 January 2009 and became fully operational on 1 January 2010.
Role and function
The Legal Services Board is an oversight regulator, and sits at the top of the regulatory system for legal services in England and Wales. It provides regulatory oversight of the eight ‘’approved regulators’’ named in the Legal Services Act of 2007 (LSA 2007), and two additional regulators added since the act gained Royal Assent.
The Act outlines the general functions of the Board, which include: a duty to promote the regulatory objectives (and act in a way which it considers most appropriate for the purpose of meeting those objectives); to assist the regulators in the maintenance and development of standards of regulation, education and training of authorised persons; to have regard to good corporate governance practice in its affairs; and to prepare an annual report detailing the discharge of its functions in the previous financial year and its performance in line with the regulatory objectives.
It also oversees the Office for Legal Complaints (the body responsible for administering the Legal Ombudsman scheme), and makes recommendations to amend the list of reserved legal activities.
Regulatory supervision
Regulation of the legal profession is the responsibility of the approved regulators (ARs). The LSB is responsible for overseeing the approved regulators and to ensure that regulation is conducted in adherence to the regulatory objectives, which it does through assessment against a regulatory performance framework. The LSB is responsible for ensuring that the approved regulators’ representative and regulatory functions are sufficiently independent from one another.
It does this by establishing Internal Governance Rules (IGR), which dictate how regulators’ independent regulatory arms are kept independent.
When regulators make changes to the rules governing those they regulate, they are required to submit an application to the LSB. The board then assesses these changes against a set of criteria on which applications can be refused, laid down in the Act.
The following list is a breakdown of the different legal professions, along with the approved regulator for that profession and its independent regulatory arm.
The approved regulators are:
The LSB has the power to recommend to the Lord Chancellor that they approve further approved regulators. This means that new bodies can apply to the LSB to become front-line regulators of parts of the legal profession. As a result of the LSA 2007 coming into force, all changes to these bodies' internal professional regulatory arrangements must be approved by the LSB.[10]:s.20/ Sch.3, Pt.3
Under Section 51 to 54, the LSB has a duty to regulate practising fees, resolve regulatory conflicts and work with the Competition and Markets Authority and Lord Chancellor on competition issues.
Regulatory objectives
It has a duty to promote eight regulatory objectives defined under the Act, a duty it shares with the approved regulators: Protecting and promoting the public interest; Supporting the constitutional principle of the rule of law; Improving access to justice; Protecting and promoting the interests of consumers of legal services; Promoting competition in the provision of legal services; Encouraging an independent, strong, diverse and effective legal profession; Increasing public understanding of the citizens' legal rights and duties; Promoting and maintaining adherence to the professional principles.
The professional principles are: Authorized persons should act with independence and integrity; Authorized persons should maintain proper standards of work; Authorized persons should act in the best interests of their clients; Persons who exercise their rights before any court, a right of audience, or conduct litigation in relation to proceedings in any court by virtue of being authorized persons, should comply with their duty to the court to act with independence in the interests of justice; Affairs of clients should be kept confidential.