Introduction
Professionals are identified by belonging to a professional body, which typically has responsibility for regulating the standards of members. For example, in England and Wales barristers are members of the General Council of the Bar, solicitors are members of the Law Society and legal executives are members of the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives.
The professional body is not, however, directly concerned with delivering legal services. The way in which this is done usually reflects the available possibilities, for example the forms of organisation that members of the profession can join. The choice of organisational form is affected by tradition and by considerations of efficiency.It is often assumed that close proximity and close relationships promote adherence to common norms and standards. Organisational diversity is therefore seen as a threat to professional cohesion. Until recently there was great similarity in the way that solicitors and barristers organised their practices. The major difference between the everyday lives of practitioners in each profession was one of scale. Even this had an impact. Writing of the USA in the 1950s, Pound commented on the threats to professionalism posed by the ‘increasing bigness of things in which individual responsibility as a member of a profession is diminished or even lost, the exploitation of young lawyers producing pressures to organise in trade unions and the desire of the service state to replace professional services with administrative bureaux’.2
1 D Clementi, Review of the Regulatory Framework for Legal Services in England and Wales—Final Report (London, DCA, 2004) at paras 25, 111.
2 R Pound, The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times: With Particular Reference to The Development of Bar Associations in the United States (St Paul, MN, West Publishing, 1953) at 354.
One of the many things for which the Legal Services Act 2007 (LSA 2007) was notable was the promotion of new organisational forms, called Alternative Business Structures (ABS). These were promoted as a means of injecting more competition into the legal services market in the interests of consumers. The main feature of ABS is that they allow lawyers to work in organisations that are owned and managed by non-lawyers. This strikes at the professional arrangements most open to question; the monopolies of provision that the state recognises. Lawyers’ work has been organised around these monopolies and to a large extent they dictated organisational form. In order to understand the changing organisation of the legal profession it is important to consider the erosion of professional monopolies.
II.