In focus: 24 things for solicitors to look out for in 2024

2. Regulatory switch: Legal executives will find out if their representative body, CILEX, intends to press ahead with plans to transfer regulation from CILEx Regulation to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. If the expected application is made to the Legal Services Board, the oversight regulator will have 90 days to make a decision. However, CILEx Regulation has told CILEX that the representative body does not have the necessary legal authority to switch regulator ‘and stands ready to ask the courts to rule on this issue if necessary’.

4. Compensation culture: Linked to the Axiom Ince collapse are discussions about the future of the SRA’s compensation fund. The regulator’s immediate priority is how to compensate clients of the firm: the fund has £18m reserves and faces at least £33m in claims. Expect a hike in contributions in the autumn, if not sooner. Wider discussions will also begin about the future of the fund and whether solicitors can continue to pay for full client redress.

6. New year, new expenses: From this week, practitioners acting in the qualified legal representative scheme in domestic abuse cases are able to claim expenses described by the Law Society as still too low. The Ministry of Justice is hoping that £180 for travel, £100 per night for a hotel stay, £21 per night on food and up to £40 per day for other expenses will encourage more lawyers to join the scheme in 2024.

8. Civil legal aid: A government-commissioned review of how best to improve the long-term sustainability of the civil legal aid sector is expected to report back to the Ministry of Justice by the end of March. Proposals should emerge over the spring, with a consultation to follow. Final policy decisions are likely to emerge late-summer or early in the autumn. Few practitioners expect the review to lead to a flood of cash.

10. Family court transparency: The second phase of the family court’s reporting pilot and transparency order, aimed at bringing more transparency to family court proceedings, begins this month. The phase will see more courts adopt the presumption that accredited journalists and legal bloggers can report on family court cases, subject to anonymity rules. The reporting pilot was launched at the end of January 2023 in Leeds, Cardiff and Carlisle and in November was extended to cases being heard by magistrates. The pilot followed president of the Family Division Sir Andrew McFarlane’s review of transparency.

12. Big law casualties: After the pandemic ‘boom’ for commercial firms, the corporate legal market is relatively flat and the economic outlook lacklustre. Some firms signed the wrong property deal at the wrong time, and now have an overheads disadvantage compared with the competition. All are subject to wage inflation, where they in effect ‘pay to play’, shelling out for headcount, including newly qualifieds, that they may not win the work to justify. Investment in the latest legal tech is also a significant demand. Some partners may still seek to draw too much. Something has to give, because the maths cannot add up for everyone. If we are lucky, that ‘failure’ will be managed through merger with a less troubled entity. No one wants another collapse like King & Wood Mallesons (Europe) – but did enough partnerships learn the lessons of that firm’s demise?

14. Libor appeal: City trader Tom Hayes (below) will be in court in March to appeal his conviction for rigging the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR). Hayes’ case was referred to the Court of Appeal last year following a ‘wide-ranging and complex’ review by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Hayes was convicted of multiple charges of conspiracy to defraud in 2015. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison, later reduced to 11 years. His appeal concerns directions given to the jury which Hayes claims were wrong in law.

16. Conference confusion: The Solicitors Regulation Authority will hold another major conference for the in-house sector, reflecting the growing visibility and relevance of in-housers to its work. The regulator had provisionally put 14 March in the diary, though this could change after SRA chiefs were told at a Lawyers in Local Government conference that March is a busy time for some council lawyers because of the financial year-end. May is also difficult because of local elections.

18. Damages deductions: The Court of Appeal will hear Hoskin v Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust. This case asks whether receiving parties should provide a breakdown of medical agency fees, with the appeal set to end ongoing uncertainty. If the challenge is unsuccessful, agencies may have to detail the time they have spent and place claimant lawyers under pressure to reduce deductions from client damages.

Make or break for AI

One certainty for 2024 is that controversy about the role of AI technologies in law will not abate – though after the past year of hype following the release of ChatGPT we can expect talk to be more down to earth.

 

Under appropriate human supervision, several applications of generative AI are likely to become mainstream. Firms have already identified use-cases in document review, compliance and generating first drafts of documents such as case summaries. More speculative are applications in identifying disputes before they happen: both to avoid them and as the basis for large group claims. Expect more announcements along the lines of magic circle firm Allen & Overy's contract-negotiating tool.

 

Then there is the spectre of regulation. The European Parliament will vote on the EU’s pioneering AI Act, seen as the world’s first comprehensive set of laws to regulate the use of artificial intelligence. Although its measures would not come into force until 2025, its requirements – for example on data quality, documentation and human oversight of ‘high risk’ systems – will strongly influence implementations.

 

The US, under President Biden’s executive order last October, is likely to follow suit. Against this background, the future of the UK’s independent ‘pro innovation’ approach must be in doubt – particularly in the event of a change of government.

 

The need for regulation will also be thrown into sharper focus by the increasing roll-out of AI-powered legal advice services to fill the access to justice gap for individuals and small businesses. Expect a debate over the need to regulate AI professionals as we do doctors – and lawyers. How this will align with a deregulatory agenda remains to be seen.

20. Dieselgate: 2024 looks set to be the year of the class action in the courts of England and Wales. 17 January will see the next step in the so-called ‘Dieselgate’ litigation. Following a case management hearing at the end of 2023, Dame Victoria Sharp and three other judges ruled that there would be a three-day consolidated hearing at the start of 2024 to hear all existing group litigation order applications. A GLO is an order made under the Civil Procedure Rules to provide for case management of claims that give rise to common or related issues of fact or law.

22. Rugby litigation: Nearly 300 rugby union players will find out in the spring if their claims against World Rugby Limited, Welsh Rugby Union Limited and England’s Rugby Football Union are suitable for a group litigation order.

 

The long-running case is being closely followed by other sports.

 

24. General election? The smart money is now on the autumn, though in theory the prime minister could hang on to January 2025. The Labour Party will celebrate a significant anniversary on 22 January – the centenary of Ramsay Macdonald (pictured) entering Downing Street as the first Labour prime minister, albeit in a short-lived minority administration. Expect plenty of commentary about whether history will repeat itself – and how long a Labour lord chancellor, the first since Jack Straw, would last in office.