CILEx Regulation, in collaboration with the Legal Services Board and the Legal Services Consumer Panel hosted a roundtable on Wednesday 26 February 2025 to discuss the future shape of legal regulation in the light of research CRL published last year on the unregulated legal sector. This research showed that:
- Unregulated providers such as will-writers take about 10% of the overall market;
- Some evidence that this share is growing with over 200,000 unregulated providers already; the share is moreover bigger in some areas ( eg personal injury) and for certain types of customers ( eg SMEs).
- Some evidence that some consumers do not understand the distinction between regulated and unregulated providers.
Jonathan Rees, CILEx Regulation chair summed up a wide-ranging and lively debate by noting:
- CRL’s view is that the current legal framework needs to be updated to reflect the huge changes over the last 25 years. Consumers are more diverse and demanding, regulators need to be able to work independently, and technology (notably Artificial Intelligence) will have growing implications for how legal services are delivered, and how consumers access them
- Views differed on whether we should bring unregulated activities within the ambit of the 2007 Act, but all agreed that good regulation in the public interest was a prerequisite for growth
- There was broad support for the notion that risk assessment needed to be at the heart of any new system alongside the current regulation of title. The distinction between regulated and unregulated services at the moment owed more to history than risk.
- Consumers needed help and support to differentiate between regulated and unregulated providers, building on the transparency work the LSB was championing.
- While new legislation was unlikely to be an imminent prospect, there was much that regulators, consumer groups, representative bodies, trade associations and academics could do in advance to create a consensus on what changes made sense.
We would like to thank all who took part and their contributions to this important debate.
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