the chief
Message from
There is little doubt that we live in a world of fast paced change.
For some that is a scary and worrying thing, for others it heralds
the possibility of new opportunities. It is clear that some people
find change easier to deal with than others, but for everyone it is
natural to have concerns over the move from what appears to
be a stable and predictable set of experiences to one which is
more uncertain.
As I have mentioned before in this
column, law firms have had to cope
with a lot of change in recent years,
even when they did not particularly
want to. One major driver for change
was the Legal Services Act 2007. It was
a law passed in response to a review
of legal services conducted by Sir
David Clementi which concluded that
consumers were not well served by the
market as it existed at that time, and that
there needed to be fresh ways of making
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legal services more affordable and more
widely accessible. There was talk at the
time of “Tesco Law” and a predicted
influx of new providers of legal services
that were not traditional (for which
read old fashioned) law firms, but were
instead larger commercial well known
brands, branching out into Will drafting
alongside their baked bean aisles.
regulated legal service isn’t as easy
as selling beans, maybe it is because
around the time the full effect of the
2007 Act came into force, we were deep
into a recession that suddenly made
legal services look unattractive as a
way of making money. However, when
the 2007 Act was first talked about,
the response of many law firms was to
look at themselves and decide upon
a programme of change, which they
then implemented, as far as possible,
during that recession I just mentioned.
Commentators at the time talked of
law firms facing the “Perfect Storm” of
changes to the laws around ownership of
firms, downturns in work, banking issues
around less availability of loans, and less
interest paid on deposits. Most of the
changes that were made at that time
were therefore externally imposed.
As you will know, this hasn’t happened.
Maybe it is because delivering a
The position is more stable now,
hopefully. Tesco Law hasn’t materialised