The Legal Services Board has committed to build on the warning notice issued by the Solicitors Regulation Authority against SLAPPs and ‘extend those principles’ across the sector.
Speaking at an event to mark the anniversary of the London Calling report by the Foreign Policy Centre and human rights organisation ARTICLE 19, LSB chief executive Matthew Hill told a packed room there were ‘too many examples that undermine [public] trust’ for regulators to ‘confine to the sidelines’.
Last year, justice secretary Dominic Raab set out measures to clamp down on so-called strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) and the SRA issued a warning to solicitors. A government pledge to introduce anti-SLAPPs legislation has yet to be fulfilled.
Hill said yesterday: ‘In our view, much of what we see in SLAPPs are questions of conduct and conduct falls squarely into regulatory territory. Regulation has a role to play and the time is right for it to step up onto the plate.
‘Being a lawyer is more than just a job. Legal professionals belong to a group in which the public has been invited to place its trust. Lawyers hold in their hands the bricks and mortar of our safe and peaceful co-existence, trusted by society with this precious cargo and how lawyers choose to go about their work can have a profound impact on that trust.
‘We are seeing too many examples that undermine that trust for regulation to confine itself to the sidelines. SLAPPs involve using the law to bully, harass, intimidate and stifle enquiry and challenge and it is difficult to see how such conduct, which is a result of active choices made by legal professionals concerned, is compatible with the high standards the public rightly expect of lawyers and in fact are already enshrined in legislation.’
He said the LSB was also ‘just about’ to issue a call for evidence on the misuse of non-disclosure agreements to ‘cover up wrongdoing and silence victims of abuse’ to help the board ‘strengthen the arrangements in place to ensure that lawyers do not facilitate such misuse’.
He added: ‘None of this should be taken to be somehow anti-lawyer. In fact, it is precisely because we recognise and support the important role that legal professionals play that we think it is so important to get ahead of public concern on matters of ethics. Some would say legal professionals are under attack in ways that we are not used to in the UK.
‘[We are] investing in a range of projects in this area. The aim would be, based on the evidence, to build on the warning notice already issued by the SRA…strengthen it and extend those principles across the whole sector.’
The London Calling report made 24 recommendations on ‘SLAPP solutions’ which included legal regulators providing guidance to lawyers on how to identify potential SLAPP cases.
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