On 17 July 2023, Matthew Hill, CEO of the Legal Services Board, spoke at Westminster Legal Policy Forum’s event, ‘Next steps for legal education and training’. The speech is below. Check against delivery.
Speech by Matthew Hill
Thank you. It’s a great privilege to be asked to speak today.
I’m Matthew Hill, CEO of the Legal Services Board, the oversight regulator for legal services in England and Wales.
We’re a statutory body established by the Legal Services Act 2007 – independent of Government and the legal profession.
I want to say a few words about legal education and training, focusing on the contribution that regulation can play in shaping the next generation of lawyers, ensuring practitioners have the right skills and training to do their jobs throughout their careers, and create an inclusive profession where one’s background does not determine one’s ability to have a successful career in the law.
Getting these things right goes to the heart of the regulatory objectives in the Legal Services Act. Those objectives include encouraging an independent, strong, diverse and effective legal profession, protecting and promoting the public interest, and supporting the constitutional principle of the rule of law.
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 lawyers whose conduct falls short of the high standards the public deserves.
The right approach to education and training is vital to promoting consumers’ trust and confidence. It also ensures that lawyers have confidence in each other’s skills and capabilities.
In terms of specifics, I want to start with the SQE, the solicitors qualifying exam as I know it will be of interest to many on the call today.
When the LSB approved the SRA’s application to introduce the SQE, we said we would monitor progress closely and the SRA agreed to a range of actions to enable that.
The SQE was intended to widen access to the profession, and we’re keen to see it do that not just in terms of being a route to qualification but also in reducing the ethnicity attainment gap.
While no-one expected the SQE to be an immediate solution, the establishment of a single point of reference has made it clear that this gap is very much present, with white students performing significantly better than those from other backgrounds. This needs to change.
The SRA is working to address this and has published a literature review forming the first part of its work. Once it has completed the second phase in Spring 2024, we want to see it take prompt action to reduce the gap wherever possible. Having wrested control of assessment from the law schools at least partly on the basis of improving diversity and inclusion, the SRA needs to show a proper return on the investment.
But this isn’t just a challenge for the SQE and the SRA. Similar gaps persist in other legal and professional exams, requiring collective action from all regulators.
Too many people find accessing legal education and training to be a barrier to being a lawyer. Our recent qualitative research on under-represented groups trying to enter and progress through the profession suggests the sector is missing opportunities to bring in a diverse range of talent through its approach to recruitment, including access to training contracts and pupillage.
People without professional contacts or guaranteed access to training, or those who had not attended specific universities, said this hindered their progress.
We heard stories about non-Russell group universities being left off drop-down lists on application portals. It was literally the case that if you went to the wrong university you couldn’t apply.
Others told us about workplaces that failed to make reasonable adjustments in line with the Equality Act. People who didn’t have the time or funding for training or unpaid work experience also struggled. This included people already working full time, from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, with caring responsibilities, or those living with a disability. I have heard testimony from one pupillage candidate with a spinal injury that the reasonable adjustment made by one chambers was to offer to carry him up the stairs.
This is unacceptable.
Many lawyers described how the barriers started from an early age and how they left school with no idea of how to become a lawyer and what training was needed. It isn’t right that young people keen to pursue a career in law can’t find the right path and are put off before they’ve even started.
We need to demystify the routes to entry. But more than that, we must address and do away with the perception that the law is an exclusive profession.
I want to ensure that regulation plays a part in driving the culture change needed to ensure everyone who wants to be a lawyer can gain the skills and experience necessary to pursue a successful career.
I want to turn now to the LSB’s work on ongoing competence.
Central to this is the need for society to have confidence that lawyers have the right skills, knowledge and behaviours throughout their careers to protect our interests, understand and safeguard our rights and keep us safe.
A year ago, we took action to ensure lawyers not only have to demonstrate their competence upon qualification but also maintain it.
The regulators are making good progress in meeting the outcomes we set. They have committed to initiatives to ensure they have the right standards to promote ongoing competence, improved intelligence about levels of competence among lawyers, and are putting measures in place to ensure they can respond to poor competence.
I hope this positive trajectory continues.
You only need to switch on the news for an example of an area where lawyers will need to develop new skills and understanding. Not a day goes by without stories of advancements in artificial intelligence, which looks set to revolutionise how we all do our jobs.
Education and training must evolve to ensure legal services providers maximise opportunities while understanding the risk. Regulation should support that.
However, the legal services sector often lags behind other sectors in technology adoption. The Covid-19 pandemic forced many to adapt quickly and embrace video conferencing and electronic signatures, which has widened access to legal services. Before this, progress on innovation was slow.
Today, fewer than 5% of law firms are considering introducing advanced technologies like AI. Used safely, innovations like AI can increase access to services and lower costs. So, we need to ensure that education and training keep up with the pace of technological change and meet changing consumer expectations and indeed reflect on the big question of what it will mean to be a lawyer as we approach the middle third of the twenty first century.
It is also important that, as a profession, we can assess and consider the ethical implications of artificial intelligence. Indeed, ensuring high standards of professional ethics is the final area I want to reflect on before I finish.
Being a lawyer requires more than technical competence. Lawyers must uphold the rule of law and observe the professional principles – and these aspects of professional practice should be instilled through the education and training system and maintained throughout their careers.
The Post Office miscarriages of justice provide a compelling case for considering the standards of professional ethics required from lawyers, and we all must learn from it. We mustn’t wait for the Inquiry to deliver its verdict. We should all consider how to foster high standards and ensure such a scandal is never repeated. The learning should inform education and training.
Society relies on lawyers to protect and defend them, and as the Post Office scandal shows, when ethical standards are undermined, it affects people’s lives.
At the LSB, through our programme of work on professional ethics, we want to gain consensus across the sector on what upholding the rule of law means for expectations of professional, ethical conduct on the part of legal professionals.
I’ve covered several areas related to education and training, which the LSB will bring together in updated guidance for regulators later this year. Education and training pathways are the gateways into the legal sector, and the LSB will play its part in removing barriers and creating an inclusive profession everyone can all be proud of.
Thank you
