With half the economies of Europe going down the pan – and the other half already there – it is appropriate that one of the issues most exercising the legal world is that of wills and probate. Last month the Legal Services Board published proposals to make will writing and estate administration 'reserved activities'. The justification for the proposal is that it would allow for regulation of the activities and the protection of consumers.
Quoted in the Law Society Gazette, the LSB said that "too often consumers were subjected to unfair sales practices...and indeed the incidence of fraud, was also disappointing".
Of course such practices could not exist among our venerable legal community: one that includes (well, included) such upstanding practitioners as David Friesner, Richard Simkin and Zaki Sharif (did the latter two really pay £2,400 for a signed photo of Mohamed Ali?).
Maybe the service providers in the Expert Witness Directory would agree with the move. It's true that more and more non-solicitors have been offering such services, and to be fair to the LSB there has been a rise in the number of wills going to probate that was, in the words of one probate expert, "in direct proportion to the number of DIY wills".
That last comment was in response to figures from the Probate Service which showed that the share of probate grants to solicitors and other specialist firms last year was just 44%, having fallen by 30% from 2006 to 2010. Now I wonder whether making such activities 'reserved' would lead to a reversal in that trend...mmm.
LASPO is now on the statute books, there having been what seems from here an unseemly rush to Royal Assent. Lord Bach, the Labour Peer who led the rearguard action against it, has stepped down from his post and has described parts of what is now the Act as "not just bad but actually wicked". In his Tweets he was vociferous against the Liberal Democrats, who did not oppose the Bill in the Lords. It could be that LASPO was one element of what Lib Dem president Tim Farron meant when he apologised to all the councillors who got the boot last Thursday, when all the disaffected Labour voters realigned themselves.
Farron said in an interview for the BBC: "Those guys lost their seats last night not through their fault, but through our fault because of where we are nationally being in government."
Somehow, I think it's unlikely. Most people don't think about access to justice until they themselves are deprived of it; when they can't get legal aid and can't appoint an expert witness to add weight to their case.
On which subject, court officials are due to start industrial action tomorrow, throwing the justice system into turmoil and slowing up the whole process. As one wag commented on the Gazette notice board: "I doubt anybody would notice."
Chris Stokes