Fission or Fusion – Independence or Constraint?
John Wotton, President of the Law Society, gave the Law Society President’s Annual Oxford Lecture on ‘Fission or fusion: independence or constraint?’ on 24 January at the Saïd Business School. Hosted jointly by the Oxford University Faculty of Law and the Novak Druce Centre, his lecture considered the opportunities and threats facing the independent legal professions in an increasingly competitive and corporate sector. Read on for a full report of the lecture, or click here for the transcript.
Fission or Fusion in Future for the Law?
Will the historic divide between solicitors and barristers be swept away under reforms coming into force under the Legal Services Act? And what future generally for the UK legal profession with its myriad providers, of which there are more in this country than doctors’ surgeries? These were questions with which the Law Society’s President John Wotton judiciously grappled in a lecture under the auspices of the Novak Druce Centre at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School on 24 January, eliciting deeply divided views among his audience.
‘There must be competitive advantages and efficiencies to be gained from having the full range of dispute resolution services under the same roof,’ Mr Wotton commented. ‘I envisage the time coming when the barrister/ solicitor distinction will be more a decorative than a functional aspect of our legal constitution,’ he added. ‘‘The barrister/ solicitor division … is unknown in the civil law world and increasingly anomalous in today's common law world, surviving in a handful of jurisdictions internationally.’
‘As the financial crisis has demonstrated, neither weak regulation nor fragmented regulatory responsibilities are necessarily in the public interest,’ Wotton went on. ‘One could envisage a merger between the SRA and Bar Standards Board, without losing either the distinct professional titles of barrister and solicitor, or the separate professional bodies of which they are respectively members. The advantages? A single code of conduct for areas of overlap, such as advocacy, conflicts of interests and rules regarding entities.’ However, weighing current opinion and possible costs, he conceded that ‘the balance of the argument lies in favour of maintaining the model of a number of regulators, based currently (but not immutably) on professional title.’
‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,’ responded Baroness Deech, Chair of the Bar Standards Board. ‘There are important constitutional issues here. Having received intensive training in advocacy, barristers take individual responsibility for facing the court as opposed to the client.’ The real problem is the oversubscription for pupillage places, she added. ‘As long as young people queue up for those, we should respond to that.’
Pressed by legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg on the prospects for barristers, Wotton predicted a time when a ‘law firm with a strong litigation and advocacy practice may choose to take a group of new recruits who have completed the common postgraduate course providing them with an integrated training/ pupillage. In due course those best suited to advocacy would emerge and receive sufficient advocacy training to secure higher court rights, while others would receive the training necessary for litigation or non-contentious work.’
Alternative business structures (ABSs), a new model under the Act’s allowing non-lawyers to own or invest in law firms, have created some apprehension, but Wotton downplayed their impact. ‘ABS have no magic bullet in competitive terms … coming as I do from one of the largest and most international City practices, which has during my career gone through all stages of evolution from conventional, single office partnership to a global, professionally managed business I find surprising any suggestion that there is a necessary conflict between running a firm as a business for profit and the ethics and values of the legal profession.’
‘Lawyers are not a caste apart. They are providers of professional services, in common with many other groups in society.’ ‘The number of independent practices will reduce,’ he concluded, ‘but the best will compete successfully in the new environment. Overall, the public’s demand for legal services will be met and to equally high standards. It would be surprising indeed if the legal sector did not continue to grow, as it has consistently in the past.’