Our fourth full Board meeting of the year took place online on 25 September. Here are a few of the highlights.
The papers for the meeting can already be read on our website and full minutes will be published later. We remain fully committed to being an exemplar of transparency in the world of legal regulation.
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- Strategy 2025-7: the Board was grateful to all those who commented on the draft corporate strategy, consultation on which closed on 14 September. It was particularly pleased that there were over 22,000 views of the webinar we had held, and broad support for our proposals. 90% of respondents agreed that CRL should continue to provide specialist independent regulation for all CILEX professionals serving the public. We remain on track to publish the final version of the Strategy in November.
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- Consumer Empowerment: we welcomed the LSB’s approval of our new regulatory arrangements for transparency, which mean we are the first regulator to require all the law firms we regulate to publish price and service information for all legal services. We also discussed the steps we have already taken to meet the LSB’s statement on empowering consumers.
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- Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: we reviewed progress made since we published our first EDI strategy in 2022, noting significant improvements in quality and breadth of our data, and the research we had commissioned, notably Beyond Buzzwords published earlier this year. We agreed that whilst progress had been made, key issues like uneven progression and recognition require a major cross-sector approach, and we agreed a programme of work to help achieve this.
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- Operational Performance: we reviewed our operational performance for the first half year and were pleased to see continued improvement across the board. We welcomed for instance an improvement in the time taken to consider applications for practice rights of nearly 10 weeks ( 25%) over the same period last year. We were very pleased by the reaction to the work we are leading to help the profession, noting for instance that the webinar on the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence had been viewed nearly 20,000 times.
- Practising Certificate Fee: The Board received an update on the consultation on the PCF for next year noting that our proposals for a small increase after many years of holding the cost had been supported by a majority of respondents. We will now finalise the formal application to the Legal Services Board.
Our next planned Board catch-up is on 16 October with our next full meeting on 14 November.
As always, if you would like to know more, please access the CRL board web page to read our Board papers or get in touch.
