Yes, I am one of those freaky people that rather enjoys dealing with compliance and the problems that come up in the everyday running of a legal practice. Partly, it's the intellectual challenge of making decisions about issues that are sometimes quite finely balanced. Partly, it's the sense of satisfaction when the work that you do leads to an orderly and functional outcome.

On Wednesday last week I was at the ICC in Birmingham with 1200 other law firms' compliance officers from England & Wales. It was good to meet old friends who share the same kind of warped passion for this subject as myself. Some were colleagues of mine when I was an officer of the Law Society at a time when we acted both as the regulator and the representative of the Solicitors Profession. We all knew then that the days of self-regulation by professional bodies was coming to an end. Public pressure, coupled with some very poor decision making in the past made the creation of an independent regulator inevitable.

Now only journalists seem to behave with impunity with no effective external regulator. Having pressed for everyone else to succumb to their fate, they plead 'Freedom of Speech' even though the first principle of their proposed regulatory regime was precisely that. How ironic that these supposed guardians of the of the people are the very ones that destroy so many people's lives. It was good that 70 female MPs wrote to support Megan and Harry. Some of these MPs are now leaving the profession after enduring the barrage of sometimes unfair public scrutiny of their lives.

Before regulation was hived off to the SRA (Solicitors Regulation Authority), I was the Chair of the Law Society Standards Board which set the regulations for the solicitors profession, and before I had become Chair we had already embarked on the reform of our rule book. I think that it could be said that the SRA have now completed that reform process. Our aim was to compress hundreds of pages of rules into a simply compressed code. We partially succeeded. The Standards and Regulations that become operational on November 26th have now completed the job.

Wisely, they split the rules into two; those that apply to individual solicitors and those that apply to regulated practices. In total, the two rule books are down to under 20 pages. They have also now issued formal guidance on their attitude to prosecution. Woe betide any solicitor who behaves badly, either in their day job or outside in their everyday lives. 

The new standards also liberalise the legal services marketplace. One of the reforms I like to think we would have introduced. The new rules allow some solicitors to operate as freelance lawyers, rather like barristers. This strikes me as a sensible reform, leveling the playing field between solicitors and the Bar. However, as I said in a piece a couple of weeks ago, the second strikes me as risky. It allows organisations who can not be regulated by the SRA to employ solicitors to provide services to clients provided that legal work is not reserved under the Legal Services Act. I asked the question at the conference as to how the SRA would prevent a company which was, in effect, a front for money laundering, from employing solicitors. They were unable to give a coherent answer, apart from their reliance on the honesty of the lawyer so employed. 

Isn't it odd that a regulator, not composed of a majority of lawyers, is prepared to put the reputation of the profession on the line and compromise the safeguards available to clients. A self-regulated regulator would never have taken such a risk. The SRA say that the need to promote competition in the market trumps safeguards for the public. I suppose the real answer is that what goes around comes around and when the inevitable scandal occurs down the line, the cards will once again be thrown into the air and we will se where they land.