Brian Inkster

This was on the back of its announcement of a deferral of at least a further two years (to add to the existing 15 years since the introduction of the Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010) in bringing about alternative business structures (ABS) or licensed legal service providers (LLSP) in Scotland.

Margaret Taylor, writing in The Lawyer under the heading Scotland’s Law Society is shackling its law firms, considers it to be “a serious abdication of its duty to the profession”.

Taylor refers to the Law Society of Scotland as “the spanner in the works”. She considers that the Society “failed to pull its regulatory finger out” in 2010.

Furthermore, Taylor states that “by failing to give Scottish firms the option of riding the private equity wave, the law society is now putting its members at a serious disadvantage”.

Then Paul Rogerson, editor of The Law Society Gazette, sets out his thoughts in the leader column of the latest edition of The Gazette under the heading Bordering on farce.

Rogerson is scathing of the Law Society of Scotland’s relationship with the Scottish Parliament: “I have not encountered an organisation with more lobbying clout than the Law Society of Scotland. In fact, it seems to me that the venerable Edinburgh institution has the Holyrood legislature just where it wants it.”

This, he says, is particularly so in how they managed to repulse any prospect of a fully independent regulator for lawyers in Scotland as recommended by the Roberton Review.

He then turns to ABS and opines: “Also impressive – or notorious – is the artfulness displayed by the Society in staving off the (related) prospect of non-lawyer ownership of law firms. Godot himself will fetch up in Princes and Sauchiehall streets before alternative business structures arrive.”

The main reason, cited by The Law Society of Scotland, for their latest two year freeze on ABS, is the “limited interest” expressed by their members. Rogerson, usefully, reminds us that in 2012: “The Society’s own executive director of regulation reported that increasing numbers of Scottish firms had been contacting the Society to ask about becoming a licensed provider. He went on to warn, however, that new regulations enabling them to convert remained ‘some way off’.”

Rogerson concludes: “‘Some way off’ indeed. The good director long since carried his talent for understatement into retirement.”

These two independent, no-holds-barred criticisms of the Law Society of Scotland in one week, from respected legal journalists, must make one wonder what is going on at Atria One.

The Law Society of Scotland must now address these criticisms.