The Legal Services Market
At the time the LSA 2007 was enacted the legal services market was worth about £20 billion a year, approximately 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product. The number of lawyers per head of population had risen from one per 1,000 people to one per 400 over the previous 20 years, partly because the numbers of women practicing as solicitors increased to equal the numbers of men.
The number of law firms had, however, declined by one-tenth, to 9000, largely as a result of mergers. This consolidation was driven by declining fee levels and rising costs. Nevertheless, it was arguable that there were too many firms, meaning that high quality, represented by increasing numbers of legal professionals, was spread too thin, and the overhead of collective legal practice was too high.3There were around 145,500 practising lawyers in England and Wales in 2011. They comprised 120,202 solicitors, 15,204 barristers, 7907 members of the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives, 1071 licensed conveyancers, 639 trade mark attorneys, 1687 patent attorneys, 858 notaries and 565 law costs draftsmen.4 The number of people engaged in providing legal services may be far greater. This is because some areas of work, immigration and asylum for example, are performed by lawyers and non-lawyers and the non-lawyers do not appear in these figures.
A large number of people performing legal tasks under the supervision of qualified lawyers, para-legal workers, for example, do not register in official figures for the numbers of lawyers in the legal services market. The number of ‘legal associate professionals’ increased from 24,000 to over 50,000 between 2001 and 2009,5 bringing the total numbers providing what could be legal services to around 200,000. These figures are
3 S Mayson, Legal Services Reforms: Catalyst, Cataclysm or Catastrophe? (London, Legal Services Policy Institute, 2007).
4 www.legalservicesboard.org.uk/can_we_help/faqs/.
5 UK Commission for Employment, Skills for Jobs: Today and Tomorrow. The National Strategic Skills Audit for England 2010.
very uncertain. Some areas of work have an ambiguous status as ‘legal work’. Advice giving, for example, may or may not have a legal dimension.
III.
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