Legal watchdog scrapped
The Office for the Supervision of Solicitors is reportedly being axed and a new complaints service set up in its place.
The new service, due to be launched next month, will not be responsible for policing solicitors’ professional conduct but will instead focus on conciliation in order to speed up the system.
The Office for the Supervision of Solicitors has long been criticised for failing to improve consumer confidence in the profession and struggling to address the mounting number of complaints against solicitors.
A government consultation paper, published this week, posits the creation of a new super-regulator for the legal profession, as one of a number of proposed reforms, The Guardian reports.
The government-commissioned review of the legal services sector is led by the Prudential chairman, Sir David Clementi.
The legal profession prefers a softer option, by which the Law Society and the bar continue to regulate themselves, with their regulatory function separated from their trade union function and monitored by a legal services board.
The OSS was created in 1996 to replace the discredited Solicitors Complaints Bureau.
In 1999 a report from the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies attacked the OSS, concluding that it was neither “an even-handed disciplinary system nor an effective complaints handler”.
Last September, after a series of warnings to the Law Society, the lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, announced the creation of a new complaints commissioner, and a nine-month trial of the new conciliation-based complaints handling system at the society’s Holborn office has been rated a success.
Once the OSS is disbanded, professional conduct will be dealt with by the Law Society’s regulatory directorate.
