The Solicitors Regulation Authority expressed its disappointment last week that the constraints of the parliamentary timetable mean it will not be able to begin licensing alternative business structures on 6 October, when the final provisions of the Legal Services Act 2007 come into force.

But the regulator is not the only one disappointed by the delay; so too, of course, is the Co-operative Group, which has previously told the Gazette that it wanted to be one of the first ABSs to be licensed.

The delay to the SRA’s plans to license ABSs will not halt the ABS train altogether; the Council of Licensed Conveyancers has already been approved by the Legal Services Board as an ABS regulator, and will be authorised to grant ABS licences from 6 October.

But the CLC will only be able to license a fairly narrow range of activities compared to what the SRA will offer. And that will not be enough to accommodate the Co-op’s ambitious plans.

Jonathan Gulliford, sales & marketing director at Co-operative Legal Services, tells me that the group wants to be an ‘across-the-board’ legal services provider once it gets hold of that ABS licence.

He says it aims to be a ‘big provider’ of consumer legal services, including residential conveyancing and family law.

There will also be a ‘big push’ in areas of unreserved work which the Co-op already conducts, such as estate administration, will-writing and employment law.

Gulliford said that in many of these unreserved areas, the Co-op already employs qualified solicitors, but under the current rules it is not permitted to hold these out as a solicitor service. All that will change when it becomes an SRA-regulated ABS, and the Co-op will conduct this work ‘as solicitors’.

The run-up to ABSs and the group’s planned expansion in the legal market is very much Gulliford’s focus at the present time. But once time and resources permit, he told me that the group also plans a national rollout of the pilot it ran in Bristol earlier this year, in which legal advice was offered through branches of Britannia bank. Customers were ‘delighted’ with the service, he says. As far as a national rollout goes, it is a question of when, not if.

Gulliford says that although he is disappointed that the SRA will not be able license ABSs in October, the group understands that the proper processes must be followed. The Co-op appears to have a constructive relationship with the regulator, and Gulliford mentions that it had ‘a lot of input’ into outcomes-focused regulation. It is due to meet with the SRA and Legal Services Board to discuss how it should go forward with its application.

Gulliford himself has been working on the opening up of the legal services market for the past 11 years, since the publication of the Office of Fair Trading’s report into the market in 2001. He is encouraged that although there has been a delay, the SRA does plan to be able to license ABSs by the end of the year.

Needless to say, he still hopes that the Co-op will be one of the first to submit an application.

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