I have a confession: the whole Legal Services Act (LSA)/Tesco law thing bores me terribly. Legal Week was so quick off the mark to cover the saga that my interest was exhausted by the point the profession started taking it seriously. The jargon, the acronyms, the thicket of regulation, the personal injury – it’s too much even for an industry anorak to sustain attention. And yet the success of the LSA’s authors in cloaking historic reform of the UK’s £25bn legal market in torturous language should not obscure how fundamentally the profession is being – and already has been – shaken up.
You only have to look back to the context of the Act’s creation to see how substantially it has already remade the legal industry and encouraged an environment in which innovation could, if not quite flourish, then no longer be actively resisted. Often that has had little to do with the actual rules. Many of the alternative models could have been deployed in some form well before the Act came into force. Volume arms, legal processing, accountancy-linked networks, companies offering legal advice – in various guises they have been previously tried.
