On 20 September 2023, Richard Orpin, Director, Regulation & Policy at the Legal Services Board, spoke at the Legal Wales Conference on the topic of ‘delivering excellence in legal services in Wales’. The speech is below.
Speech by Richard Orpin
Good morning to you all, I’m Richard Orpin, Director of Regulation & Policy at the Legal Services Board where I lead the LSB’s policy, research and regulatory teams.
As the oversight regulator for legal services in England and Wales, our role is to hold the frontline legal services regulators to account for their performance.
I’m very clear that in order to do that effectively, it’s really important that we hear directly from people right across Wales and England about their experience of working in, or seeking to access, legal services.
I’m therefore delighted to be here today, just as I was delighted to be in Cardiff only last month for the Legal Service’s Board strategy meeting and a series of stakeholder meetings and events. We were privileged to visit and meet with colleagues from Cardiff Law School, Cardiff School of Management, the Speakeasy Law Centre and the Law Council for Wales to hear about the issues that matter to them.
It was also fantastic to host a reception in the Senedd on 13 September which brought together stakeholders from across the sector working in Wales. We gained valuable knowledge from the event and came away with lots of learning and actions, and it’s great to see some familiar faces in the audience today.
And the reason that listening to and collaborating with people is so important is because we need to collaborate widely to achieve our vision of reshaping legal services to better meet society’s needs.
In our sector wide strategy, published in 2021, we identified a series of key challenges that need to be overcome to do this, which draw upon the regulatory objectives we are required by Parliament to promote. Among those is lowering unmet legal need, and by extension, improving access to justice. This issue came through time and again in conversations with people and organisations in Wales as the issue of greatest concern to them. We share that concern. So I’d like to focus today on how regulation can improve access to justice and help deliver excellence in legal services in Wales.
First, let’s start with the facts. Our research shows that in Wales, 31% of adults, and 4% of small businesses, have an unmet legal need. That amounts to nearly 200,000 people and over 4,000 small and medium sized businesses in Wales each year. These figures are broadly comparable to England. Our ambition is for anyone needing legal advice to be able to shop around easily and compare the quality of the services on offer. Whether you live in the heart of Cardiff or in rural Carmarthenshire, we believe everyone should be able to find a legal services provider that best meets their needs at a price they can afford.
Here are three ways in which we think regulation can make a difference.
Consumer empowerment
The first is consumer empowerment. Our ambition is to improve price transparency and make it easier for people who need legal services to shop around.
In April last year, we published a statutory statement of policy on empowering consumers to better access information about the price and quality of legal services providers. The statement outlines the steps regulators should take to ensure people and small businesses who need legal advice have the information they need to shop around and choose the provider most suitable for them.
It requires regulators to implement effective programmes of activity to support public legal education, focusing on activities that help people understand when they have a legal problem and how to access the professional help to resolve it. This includes, for example, contributing to cross-sector initiatives like the Legal Choices website to increase public understanding of citizen’s legal rights and duties.
At the moment, too many people and businesses don’t get access to the legal help they need. Often that’s because they don’t have the information that would give them the confidence to get that help. Information like what to expect from a lawyer, how much it will cost and what quality of service they can expect. These are all areas that, while challenging, are not beyond the ingenuity of the sector.
In our view, if regulators and legal professionals work together, we can transform the relationship between consumers and providers to help people get clear and useful information about the legal services they need. We’ll be holding regulators to account for their performance in delivering against this statutory obligation as part of our regular regulatory performance assessments.
Technology as an enabler
Now you might say that empowering consumers is all well and good but doesn’t help much when you have legal advice deserts where many people simply can’t get the services they need no matter how empowered they are. That brings me onto the second way in which we believe regulation can help, which is the deployment of technology as an enabler of access to justice.
Our research shows that most members of the public are willing to use a variety of technologies to access legal services. Indeed, in England and Wales, six in ten (60%) law firms agree that their clients expect them to use technology to deliver their services. In Wales, that figure is in even higher at 76%.
However, our research suggests that law firms in Wales are less likely to offer services online (26% compared to 32% for England and Wales) and firms in Wales are less likely to invest in IT (34% compared to 42% for England and Wales overall).
We believe that technology has the potential to transform how legal services are provided, lowering barriers to access and reducing unmet legal need. We see no reason why advice deserts cannot be consigned to the past in a world where technology can enable access to justice regardless of where someone is based.
Our approach to technology is therefore to consider it as both an enabler to reducing unmet legal need, and as a spur to increase competition and drive innovation. So while it is, of course, important for regulators to understand and respond proportionately to risk, we want them first and foremost, to adopt an open stance on technology and innovation. That’s why we have consulted on proposals in the form of statutory guidance to regulators aimed at unlocking the benefits of technology and innovation to improve access to legal services.
We’re currently analysing responses to this consultation, which closed only a few days ago, and will consider next steps in light of that feedback.
Consumer confidence and redress: how we are working to drive forward improvements
And finally, a third way in which we believe regulation can help improve access to justice is when things go wrong. Our starting point is that consumers and small businesses should have confidence that the legal support they receive is provided by a competent lawyer with up-to-date skills and training and a high standard of professional ethics. But they should also know they are protected and can seek redress if something doesn’t go as it should do.
Unfortunately, research shows that this isn’t always the case. Research by the Legal Services Consumer Panel shows that in 2022, 26% of adults who were unhappy with the legal service they received did nothing about it. Through our own research, we know that many people lack confidence that their complaints will be taken seriously. Many people think that making a complaint will be an arduous process, and some people find it hard to know how to make a complaint.
We are therefore currently consulting on proposals to ensure that people who use legal services have access to fair and effective complaint procedures at the first tier. The proposals are designed to strengthen consumer protection and improve the quality and standards of legal services.
Achieving this demands a culture where legal professionals and law firms respond promptly to complaints and use them to improve their services. Providers should also proactively seek feedback – good and bad – from clients and learn from it to design consumer-focused services that support them to be more competitive.
In our view, an effective and fair redress system is imperative to ensuring access to justice and safeguarding the public interest. Our proposals are designed to support a culture in which the sector responds positively and proactively to complaints and embraces consumer feedback to learn lessons and raise standards. This will help increase public trust and confidence in the sector.
To conclude, we are actively listening to the concerns of people in Wales and in England. We understand that access to justice is a key concern for people and organisations. While we recognise that for many people, legal aid funding and access to the publicly funded justice system is critical, we want to ensure that regulation plays its part in reducing unmet legal need and delivering excellence in legal services. Thank you.
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