On 24 April 2023, Matthew Hill, CEO of the Legal Services Board, spoke at an event to mark the one-year anniversary of the ‘London Calling’ report by the Foreign Policy Centre and human rights organisation ARTICLE 19. The speech is below. Check against delivery.
Speech by Matthew Hill
Thank you very much. It’s a great privilege to be asked to speak today and to be among such stellar company.
I am Matthew Hill, CEO of the Legal Services Board. The LSB is the oversight regulator for legal services in England and Wales.
We’re a statutory body established by the Legal Services Act 2007. We’re independent of both Government and the legal profession.
I’m here to say a few words about the contribution that regulation – as distinct from legislation – can make on the issue of SLAPPs and on other forms of misuse of the law.
In our view, much of what we see in SLAPPS are questions of conduct, and conduct is squarely in regulatory territory. While I pay tribute to the Foreign Policy Centre and others for their efforts to get SLAPPs on the legislative agenda, regulation can complement legislation, and with greater pace and flexibility, if regulators step up to the plate and enjoy sufficient political will.
Parliament set for the LSB eight regulatory objectives that we and the regulators we oversee have a duty to promote. They include things like protecting and promoting the interests of consumers, protecting and promoting the public interest and supporting the constitutional principle of the rule of law.
It’s in the context of those objectives that we have been turning our minds to the question of professional ethics.
In our view, being a lawyer is more than just a job. Legal professionals belong to a group in which the public is invited to place its trust.
Lawyers hold in their hands the bricks and mortar of our safe and peaceful co-existence. They are entrusted by society with this precious cargo. How lawyers choose to go about their work can have a profound impact on this trust.
We are seeing to many examples that undermine trust for regulation to confine itself to the sidelines.
The example of SLAPPs is the one that we have in common today. SLAPPs involve using the law to bully, harass, intimidate and stifle enquiry and challenge. It is difficult to see how such conduct – which is a result of active choices made by the legal professionals concerned – is compatible with the high standards the public rightly expects of lawyers and that are already enshrined in legislation.
A closely related example is the misuse of non-disclosure agreements to cover up wrongdoing and silence victims of abuse. At the LSB we are shortly to issue a call for evidence to help us strengthen the arrangements in place to ensure that lawyers do not facilitate such misuse.
I could go on to talk about the Post Office scandal, about “Londongrad”, about slow response from the sector to the Ukraine sanctions regime and ongoing weaknesses in anti-money laundering controls.
Add to that the growing concern amongst the profession itself about the difficulties faced by in house counsel in navigating the many challenging conflicts they face. The SRA’s recent thematic review in this area made a compelling case.
None of this should be taken to be somehow “anti lawyer”. In fact it is precisely because we recognise and support the important role that legal professionals play that we think it so important to get ahead of public concern on matters of ethics. And it is more important now, I would argue, than it has ever been. Some would say that the legal professions are under attack in ways that we are not used to in the UK.
So at the LSB we have made professional ethics and the role of regulation in securing them a major focus of our current plans.
Regulation sets and upholds standards. It governs education, training and competence. It sets a lead on ethical conduct. It controls the gateway into the professions and removes those whose conduct is not compatible with the high standards the public deserves.
Properly deployed, it can create powerful transparency and meaningful lines of accountability. And it can complement legislative solutions, often with greater pace and flexibility.
So we are investing in a number of projects under the banner of “Professional ethics and the rule of law”. We’re expecting that to strengthen regulation in a range of areas. Some of that will be general – looking for example at the role of education and training. Others will be more specific. I’ve already mentioned our work on misuse of NDAs. I am expecting that to be followed by SLAPPs, where our aim would be, based on the evidence, to build on the warning notice issued by the SRA and extend the principles across the whole sector.
I am going to close now. But if you take away one point from what I’ve said it’s this. Legislating to prevent SLAPPs is welcome. But it will be infinitely more effective if done in tandem with regulating to prevent the poor ethics and misconduct that have allowed SLAPPs to happen in the first place.
Thank you.
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