It’s been a tumultuous few days: watching the Euros final from behind the sofa, switching from a Tory majority of 80 (well, a few less by the end) to a Labour majority of 172, and the assassination attempt on former president Trump.
Being a solicitor offers relative calm and comfort. Our livelihoods and working futures are not directly dependent on unpredictable contingencies: the ricochet of a flying ball, the mood of a voter putting a cross on a ballot paper – or, unimaginably worse, the path of a deadly bullet. (Of course, being a lawyer in another jurisdiction can provide a different and sometimes more terrible outcome.)
We are lucky in our profession to have legal procedures and legal text which stay more or less fixed, and, if they are changed, we receive appropriate advance notice. This article focuses on the notice we are about to receive of substantial change in this week’s King’s speech.
I could have waited until Wednesday, when we are told that 35 bills will be presented to parliament. But I shall talk about the major thrust of government policy – growth and planning, intertwined goals – which Labour emphasised throughout its campaign. They are as certain as the other campaign standby: that Keir Starmer’s father was a toolmaker.
We have a role to play in growth. Our own profession, thanks largely to the big firms in the City of London, is a growth driver.
Legal services contribute £60 billion annually to the UK economy. The last time the Law Society investigated its value in detail, a few years ago, the UK exported approximately £5bn worth of legal services and imported approximately £0.80bn, which made a positive net contribution of £4.29bn to UK balance of trade. This was the highest balance of trade among professional services sectors. In a sign of the sector’s continuing growth, the export figure is now up to £6.6bn per year.
On top of that, legal services employ over 1% of the total UK workforce, a uniquely productive 1%, with an average contribution per employee of £100,500, which is almost double the national average.
The new government wants to support growth, and the Law Society works hard towards the same end. City solicitors may appear so successful that it seems as if they don’t need help from their professional body. But City firms are in fact considerably assisted by the market-opening ability of the Law Society, which negotiates on their behalf with foreign bars and foreign governments. Just last month, it was announced that, after decades of effort, the Bar Council of India is likely to publish regulations by the end of this month to enable entry for the first time into the Indian legal market for solicitor.
As in the past, the Law Society will work with the Treasury and trade and justice departments to be sure that law firms are helped to grow and contribute further.
The day after the election, the Law Society called on the new government to ‘unleash legal services to drive economic growth’ because ‘(l)egal services are an economic powerhouse that creates jobs and prosperity across the country’. It listed a range of policies that would help this, including:
- putting legal services at the heart of trade policy;
- encouraging, via investment, the adoption of LawTech and AI across the legal services sector to boost productivity; and
- pushing for greater business mobility provisions to allow lawyers on short-term business trips to provide legal services under their home country title without the need for a visa or permit.
As for planning, the Law Society has a long-standing committee of experts on its Planning and Environmental Law Committee, who will doubtless be busy on the more technical aspects of any new proposed changes.
(In case it be thought that the Law Society cares only about growth and planning, its list of asks of the new government on the day after the election includes a detailed section on spending on courts and legal aid to protect and secure access to justice, familiar to all of us following the disastrous decline of the last few years, as well as another section on renewing the government’s commitment to the rule of law.)
There will be other areas which will engage the Law Society: for instance, the early prison releases already announced, workers’ rights, and maybe an artificial intelligence bill to enhance legal safeguards.
I understand that this piece has had a tenuous connection with the Euros, our recent election and the terrible news from the USA. But at a time when it is easy to feel that too many things are out of control, or at least beyond our individual control, we are relatively safe in a profession and in a country where change is usually transparent and predictable. For that, we should be grateful.
Jonathan Goldsmith is Law Society Council member for EU & International, chair of the Law Society’s Policy & Regulatory Affairs Committee and a member of its board. All views expressed are personal and are not made in his capacity as a Law Society Council member, nor on behalf of the Law Society
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