YESTERDAY THE OPTICIAN TOMORROW THE LAWYER

In the world of business there is a seismic shift brought about by the Legal Services Act that came into force last week.

The new alternative business structures (ABS) introduced by this Act will enable non-lawyers to own or part-own law firms. An inbuilt safeguard requires that these ABS must still employ lawyers to practise reserved and regulated activities. This is an important distinction, for it means that a non-lawyer who wishes to open a firm and provide, for example, conveyancing, litigation and probate services, still requires a solicitor to be employed to undertake this highly specialised work. Not to do so would be a disaster for consumers!


Remember the thousands of opticians up and down the country, on every high street? That was only a decade ago. Today, the result of deregulation is that we go to Boots, Vision Express or Specsavers for our glasses or to the local newsagent to buy non prescription glasses for £1.99. Certainly that's the cost here in Waterloo, Liverpool. Rather different from the £199 we used to pay. And can I see adequately? Yes. And if I break my glasses? No problem. I can simply buy a replacement pair for less than an Americano coffee in Cafe Nero.

When I did have prescription glasses and broke them, the hassle that followed in trying to repair them, to make an insurance claim that sidestepped the insurance company's many exceptions to valid cover, wore me down.

When the Legal Services Act received Royal Assent, the writing was on the wall. It was not nice to read. Many firms will go to the wall, some have already, and many sole practitioners will call it a day, or hastily regroup together. Some succeed, some fail.

But why this change?

The demand of the consumer is paramount. For too long consumers (all of us) have been at the mercy of various industries and commerce that seek to make money - no bad thing - but which is not then ploughed back into the business, and thereby the community, to indirectly benefit the consumer.

I always smile at business conventions and seminars at the size of the waist lines of the many and varied successful entrepreneurs gathered. It is a smile vaguely contemptuous.

I suspect there is quite a storm approaching. And the legal profession did itself no favours with its own last week when, in a onesided article by Russ Thorne in the Independent on Monday 3 October 2011, the reader could be forgiven for believing that the term 'lawyer' still only means barristers and solicitors. For over twenty years it has also officially referred to Fellows of the Institute of Legal Executives.

And not to put too fine a point on it to those dinosaurs who insist that Fellows are clerks, look at the Judiciary and see the number of Fellows sitting now as Magistrates or who are being appointed to the bench as either district judges or high court judges. When I joined the legal profession in 1981 that was unimaginable.

Times are changing, and for the better. Whether traditionalists like it or not, the day of the Co-op Will and the Co-op conveyancing and similar legal services is upon us. And if it brings greater wealth and national prosperity to all of us, as well as easier access to legal services, then let us ring in the changes with vigour.


Ian Bradley Marshall
LIVERPOOL